Background
Gresham was born in Baltimore, Maryland.
(Nightmare Alley begins with an extraordinary description ...)
Nightmare Alley begins with an extraordinary description of a freak-show geek—alcoholic and abject and the object of the voyeuristic crowd’s gleeful disgust and derision—going about his work at a county fair. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There’s no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him. And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak of ruthlessness, soon enough he’s going places. Onstage he plays the mentalist with a cute bimbo (before long his harried wife), then he graduates to full-blown spiritualist, catering to the needs of the rich and gullible in their well-upholstered homes. It looks like the world is Stan’s for the taking. At least for now.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590173481/?tag=2022091-20
( Whether writing for the detective pulps, sci-fi digests...)
Whether writing for the detective pulps, sci-fi digests, or lowbrow men's magazines, William Lindsay Gresham indulged his fascination with crime, psychology, magic, and spiritism. This book unearths twenty-four of Gresham's most fascinating short stories and essays, most of which have never been reprinted, and provides a comprehensive view of one of pulp fiction's most enigmatic figures.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1613471114/?tag=2022091-20
("An excellent account of the career of a fabulous magicia...)
"An excellent account of the career of a fabulous magician, a legend even during his lifetime...Houdini's greatest illusions and escapes, explains Author Gresham as he gives away the master's secrets, were constructed with simplicity that is the essence of true genius." - from back cover.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0532151666/?tag=2022091-20
( This engrossing graphic adaptation of the 1930s noir no...)
This engrossing graphic adaptation of the 1930s noir novel by William Lindsay Gresham is a study of the lowest depths of showbiz and its sleazy inhabitants: scheming grifters, cheap hustlers and Machiavellian femmes fatales. An adaptation of the long out-of-print 1930s cult novel of the same name by William Lindsay Gresham, illustrated by legendary underground cartoonist Spain Rodriguez. The story is a study of the lowest depths of showbiz and its sleazy inhabitants and environs, the dark, shadowy world of a second rate carnival filled with cheap hustlers, scheming grifters, and Machiavellian femmes fatales. Gresham was born in Baltimore in 1909, but grew up in New York. Nightmare Alley was highly influenced by the freaks and sideshows he routinely observed at Coney Island as a child. The dark side of carnival life is the world of Nightmare Alley, deeply rooted in early film noir and the hard-boiled books of Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain. Rodriguez's illustrations compliment Gresham's dark, brooding, cynical and complex world perfectly ― the rich imagery of Gresham's prose is perfectly realized by Rodriguez's brush. The book depicts the rise of Stan Carlisle from a carnival mentalist to a successful "spiritualist," preying on the rich and gullible matrons of society, to his eventual fall and total disintegration. Black-and-white comics throughout
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1560975113/?tag=2022091-20
Gresham was born in Baltimore, Maryland.
His best-known work is, which was adapted into a 1947 film starring Tyrone Power. As a child, he moved to New York with his family, where he became fascinated by the sideshow at Coney Island. Upon graduating from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn in 1926, Gresham drifted from job to job, and worked as a folk singer in Greenwich Village.
In 1937, Gresham served as a volunteer medic for the Loyalist forces during the Spanish Civil War.
There, he befriended a former sideshow employee, Joseph Daniel "Doc" Halliday, and their long conversations inspired much of his work, particularly Gresham"s two books about the American carnival, the nonfiction Monster Midway and the fictional Nightmare Alley. Returning to the United States in 1939, after a troubling period that involved a stay in a tuberculosis ward and a failed suicide attempt, Gresham found work editing true crime pulp magazines.
In 1942, Gresham married Joy Davidman, a poet, with whom he had two children, David and Douglas. In 1962, Gresham"s health began to take a turn for the worse.
He had started to go blind and had been diagnosed with cancer of the tongue.
On September 14, 1962, he checked into the Hotel Carter, Manhattan — which he had often frequented while writing Nightmare Alley over a decade earlier. There, 53-year-old Gresham took his life with an overdose of sleeping pills. His death went generally unnoticed by the New York press, but for a mention by a bridge columnist.
In his pocket they found business cards reading, "Number Address.
Number Phone. Number Business. Number Money. Retired.".
( This engrossing graphic adaptation of the 1930s noir no...)
(Nightmare Alley begins with an extraordinary description ...)
( Whether writing for the detective pulps, sci-fi digests...)
("An excellent account of the career of a fabulous magicia...)
(Nightmare Alley, William Lindsay Gresham, Sun Dial Press,...)