10 Things I Learned: Nightmare Alley
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10 Things I Learned: Nightmare Alley
1.
William Lindsay Gresham’s first book—the sordid carnival-sideshow noir Nightmare Alley—was the author’s only considerable literary success. A controversial best seller upon its publication in 1946, the novel was quickly followed by a film adaptation the next year. Gresham would go on to publish four more books—the novel Limbo Tower (1949), the carnival-world exposé Monster Midway (1953), the biography Houdini (1959), and the bodybuilding guide The Book of Strength (1961)—before, in declining health, he took his own life in 1962, at the age of fifty-three.
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