The Man with the Golden Arm

Summary

Set in the working-class Polish neighborhoods of postwar Chicago, the novel follows Frankie Machine, a card dealer and morphine-addicted veteran trying to claw his way out of the slums. Algren writes in a jazz-inflected, street-level prose that fuses naturalism with lyric tenderness for society's outcasts. The book helped establish urban realism as a serious literary mode and remains a touchstone for portrayals of addiction in American fiction.