A novel of rare genius The Man with the Golden Arm describes the dissolution of a card-dealing
WWII veteran named Frankie Machine caught in the act of slowly cutting his own heart into
wafer-thin slices. For Frankie a murder committed may be the least of his problems. The
literary critic Malcolm Cowley called The Man with the Golden Arm Algren s defense of the
individual while Carl Sandburg wrote of its strange midnight dignity. A literary tour de force
here is a novel unlike any other one in which drug addiction poverty and human failure
somehow suggest a defense of human dignity and a reason for hope. Seven Stories Press
separately publishes the critical edition of The Man with the Golden Arm the first critical
edition of an Algren work featuring an extra 100+ pages of insightful essays by Russell Banks
Bettina Drew James R. Giles Carlo Rotella William Savage Lee Stringer Studs Terkel Kurt
Vonnegut and others.
