For the first time, the best work of a distinctive master of American noir is available in authoritative e-book editions from The Library of America. In Street of No Return (1954), David Goodis presents a skid row odyssey in which 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.”

A native of Philadelphia, David Goodis’s signature style was a pulp expressionism who brought a jazzy edge to his spare, passionate novels of mean streets and doomed protagonists. His big break came in 1946 with the publication of Dark Passage, which was made into a film starring Bogart and Bacall. He wrote seventeen novels (including Down There, adapted by François Truffaut for his 1960 film Shoot the Piano Player), numerous short stories, film treatments, and scripts for such radio serials as Superman. He died in 1967.

Street of No Return is also in the Library of America collection David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s & 50s.