Back Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s

Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s

Edited by Robert Polito

“The most important collection of crime fiction ever published in the United States.” — Ed Gorman

Overview
News & Views

Overview

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January 6, 2022

Audio New York Public Radio: Kenneth Fearing’s media fixations made him ahead of his time
April 13, 2018

The Moviegoer Dance of the damned: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
September 7, 2017

Save $15 when you buy the boxed set of both volumes of mid-century crime novels.

Evolving out of the terse and violent style of the pulp magazines, noir fiction expanded over the decades into a varied, innovative and profoundly influential body of writing. The eleven novels in The Library of America’s adventurous two-volume collection taps deep roots in the American literary imagination, exploring themes of crime, guilt, deception, obsessive passion, murder, and the disintegrating psyche. With visionary and often subversive force they create a dark and violent mythology out of the most commonplace elements of modern life.

James M. Cain’s pioneering novel of murder and adultery along the California highway, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), shocked contemporaries with its laconic toughness and fierce sexuality.

Horace McCoy’sThey Shoot Horses, Don’t They?(1935) uses truncated rhythms and a unique narrative structure to turn its account of a Hollywood dance marathon into an unforgettable evocation of social chaos and personal desperation.

In Thieves Like Us (1937), Edward Anderson vividly brings to life the dusty roads and back-country hideouts where a fugitive band of Oklahoma outlaws plays out its destiny.

The Big Clock (1946), an ingenious novel of pursuit and evasion by the poet Kenneth Fearing, is set by contrast in the dense and neurotic inner world of a giant publishing corporation under the thumb of a warped and ultimately murderous chief executive.

William Lindsay Gresham’s controversial Nightmare Alley (1946), a ferocious psychological portrait of a charismatic carnival hustler, creates an unforgettable atmosphere of duplicity, corruption, and self-destruction.

I Married a Dead Man (1948), a tale of switched identity set in the anxious suburbs, is perhaps the most striking novel of Cornell Woolrich, who found in the techniques of the gothic thriller the means to express an overpowering sense of personal doom.

Disturbing, poetic, anarchic, punctuated by terrifying bursts of rage and paranoia and powerfully evocative of the lost and desperate sidestreets of American life, these are underground classics now made widely and permanently available.

Robert Polito, volume editor, is a poet and the author of Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award and an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He directs the writing program at The New School for Social Research in New York City.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s & 40s is kept in print by a gift from the Geoffrey C. Hughes Foundation to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

The Moviegoer Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley: The con is on
January 6, 2022

Audio New York Public Radio: Kenneth Fearing’s media fixations made him ahead of his time
April 13, 2018

The Moviegoer Dance of the damned: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
September 7, 2017

The Moviegoer Down the Nightmare Alley: A noirish dance of shadow and light
May 24, 2017

The Moviegoer When it’s okay to stray from the source: No Way Out resets The Big Clock
May 2, 2017

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ISBN: 978-1-88301146-8 990 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 94 Library of America Series

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