Back Five Noir Novels of the 1940s & 50s

David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s & 50s

Dark Passage | Nightfall | The Burglar | The Moon in the Gutter | Street of No Return

Edited by Robert Polito

“This impressive new volume is an uncharacteristically cheerful coda to David Goodis’s legacy. It will allow future generations to plunge into the luxurious sensation one experiences when reading a Goodis novel, even though it never lasts for long, and is accompanied by the dismal knowledge that it will soon be over.”—Nathaniel Rich, The New York Review of Books

Overview
News & Views

Overview

News Adopt this book: David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s & 50s
July 1, 2022

The Moviegoer Improvisation on a noir theme: The jazz of François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player
November 2, 2016

News Geoffrey O’Brien and Robert Polito on David Goodis, “our most crafty and elegant crime stylist”
February 5, 2016

This title is out of stock and a reprint has not yet been scheduled. Sign up here to receive news about forthcoming titles and reprints.

Among the pantheon of American crime writers—those masters of noir whose powerful vernacular style and dark and subversive themes transformed American culture and writing—David Goodis was a unique figure. Born in Philadelphia, he brought a jazzy, expressionist style and an almost hallucinatory intensity to his spare, passionate, uncompromising novels of mean streets and doomed people. Though little acknowledged during his lifetime, he has long enjoyed an international cult following, and his works have been adapted for the screen by directors including François Truffaut, Samuel Fuller, Jean-Jacques Beineix, and Jacques Tourneur.

Now, for the first time, his best work is collected in a single volume. Goodis experienced a brief celebrity when his novel Dark Passage (1946) became the basis for a popular movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The story of a man railroaded for his wife’s murder and forced to assume a different identity after escaping from prison becomes in Goodis’s hands a lyrical evocation of urban fear and loneliness. Nightfall (1947) further develops the theme of the innocent pursued, as artist Jim Vanning becomes accidentally embroiled in a violent robbery and must evade criminals and police alike.

In The Burglar (1953), first published like all his later novels as a paperback original, Goodis explores his characteristic notion of the criminal gang as surrogate family, wracked by thwarted aspirations and contradictory desires. The book’s reluctant criminal hero might be taken as a self-portrait of Goodis himself: “The way he operated was quiet and slow, very slow . . . always artistic without knowing or interested in knowing that it was artistic, always accurate with it and always extremely unhappy with it.”

The Moon in the Gutter (1953) is one of Goodis’s many tours of the down-and-out neighborhoods of his native city. William Kerrigan’s pursuit of the riddle of his sister’s death in an obscure alleyway provides the starting point for a tortuous journey into “the darkness of all lost dreams.” In Street of No Return (1954), another skid row odyssey, a famous crooner scarred by violence descends into dereliction. From its opening in the freezing wind of a November street corner through its explosive ending, it is imbued with Goodis’s deep identification with “the unchartered society of the homeless and the hopeless.”

Robert Polito, editor, is a poet, biographer, and critic whose Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson received the National Book Critics Circle award. He directs the Graduate Writing Program at the New School. He is also the editor of volumes #94 and #95 in the Library of America series, Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s & 40s and Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s, the latter of which includes David Goodis’s classic novel Down There.

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.

Project support for this volume was provided by the Geoffrey C. Hughes Foundation.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

News Adopt this book: David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s & 50s
July 1, 2022

The Moviegoer Improvisation on a noir theme: The jazz of François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player
November 2, 2016

News Geoffrey O’Brien and Robert Polito on David Goodis, “our most crafty and elegant crime stylist”
February 5, 2016

Interviews Robert Polito on the “melancholy and yearning” of David Goodis, who “always seems poised for rediscovery”
February 5, 2016

Or buy from our partners

Buy the eBook

ISBN: 978-1-59853-148-0 800 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 225 Library of America Series

Subscribers can purchase the slipcased edition by signing in to their accounts.

Related Books

Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s (boxed set)

Raymond Chandler: The Library of America Edition (boxed set)

American Noir: Eleven Classic Crime Novels of the 1930s, 40s, & 50s (boxed set)

Ross Macdonald: Four Novels of the 1950s LOA N°264

Dashiell Hammett: The Library of America Edition (boxed set)

Library of America

CURATOR

A champion of America’s great writers and timeless works, Library of America guides readers in finding and exploring the exceptional writing that reflects the nation’s history and culture.

Learn More

PUBLISHER

From poetry, novels, and memoirs to journalism, crime writing, and science fiction, the more than 300 volumes published by Library of America are widely recognized as America’s literary canon.

Browse our books Subscribe

NON-PROFIT

With contributions from donors, Library of America preserves and celebrates a vital part of our cultural heritage for generations to come.

Support our mission

David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s & 50s

Related Books

Get 10% off your first Library of America purchase.