num_pages: 543
description: From The Killer Inside Me to The Grifters and Pop. 1280, Jim Thompson wrote some of the darkest and most innovative crime fiction. His celebrated novels spotlight edgy, insidiously engrossing "pure products of America" who often unravel into psychopathic killers. It was Thompson's dismaying gift to roost deep within his monsters' snaky psyches, and to embody through imaginative art their terrifying voices.Now Savage Art reveals the tormented yet surprising man behind the work. Robert Polito recounts Thompson's relationship with his father, a disgraced Oklahoma sheriff, and with alcohol and the Texas underworld, with the women he adored in life and murdered on the page, with 1930s radical politics and 1950s pulp fiction publishers, as well as with director Stanley Kubrick. Vivid, resonant, and unrelenting. Savage Art marks an original contribution to American cultural history.
language: English
title: Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson
titlecomplete: Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson
genres: Mystery, Pulp, Biography, History, Crime, Noir, Psychology, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, Literature
ratings_count: 584
awards: awardedAt: 820483200000
name: Anthony Award
category: Best Critical Work, awardedAt: 820483200000
name: Edgar Award
category: Best Critical/Biographical Work, awardedAt: 788947200000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: Biography/Autobiography
publisher: Knopf