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"Ernest Hemingway predicted that he would 'rank among our best American novelists.' Malcolm Cowley hailed him as Carl Sandburg's successor, dubbing him 'the poet of the Chicago slums.' In A 1950 his classic novel The Man with the Golden Arm earned him the first National Book Award; in 1974 he received the Award of Merit for the Novel from the American Academy of Arts and Letters--an honor previously bestowed on only Nabokov, Mann, Huxley, Dreiser, Hemingway, and O'Hara. And the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir pledged her eternal love in a transatlantic affair that was one of the century's most romantic and passionate. Yet until now, Nelson Algren, the Chicago-born author of five novels, several short-story collections and travelogues, and countless essays and poems, has never been the subject of a biography. He was a man whose life was marked by compulsive gambling, disastrous marriages, and incredible extremes--from Sartre's Paris coterie to a Texas jail cell, from Hollywood parties to skid-row soup kitchens, from literary celebration to public censorship. Playing out his youthful ambition to become 'the American Gorky, ' Algren made himself a voice for the lost and despised--addict, prostitute, murderer, prisoner--portraying, with poetry and compassion, the dark underside of the American dream. A Depression radical who rode the rails as a hobo and stole a typewriter to finish his first novel, a member of left-wing literary circles with James T. Farrell and Richard Wright, he was blackballed by the Chicago Public Library, hounded by the FBI, and exploited by Otto Preminger. Still, Algren remained a hilarious raconteur, and whether as wartime correspondent in Saigon or investigative reporter of the controversial murder charge against boxer Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter, he was willful, uncompromising, original--and he managed to produce an impressive body of fiction, a lasting legacy in the deeply American tradition of such writers as Dreiser, Anderson, and Twain. Calling upon scores of interviews and hundreds of pages of manuscripts and correspondence, including the love letters of Simone de Beauvoir, Bettina Drew's vivid narrative captures the essence of a complex nonconformist whose tremendous talent lives on through his writing. It is a walk on the wild side, with a man who knew it as no other."--Jacket.