Nightmare Alley

William Lindsay Gresham (1909–1962) was a novelist and nonfiction writer. Gresham’s was a tortured mind and a tormented life, and he sought to banish his demons through a maze of dead-end ways, from Marxism to psychoanalysis to Christianity to Alcoholics Anonymous to Rinzai Zen Buddhism. From these demons came his novel Nightmare Alley (1946), one of the underground classics of American literature. He wrote one more novel, Limbo Tower (1949), which went largely unnoticed. Three nonfiction books followed: Monster Midway (1953), Houdini (1959), and The Book of Strength (1961). Nightmare Alley brought Gresham fame and fortune, but he lost it all. The second of his three wives, the poet Joy Davidman, left him in 1953 for the British author C. S. Lewis. He killed himself in New York City on September 14, 1962.Nick Tosches (1949–2019) was an acclaimed author of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Among his books are the biographies Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story and Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams; the novels In the Hand of Dante and Under Tiberius; and the poetry collection Chaldea and I Dig Girls. He died in New York City in 2019.