num_pages: 224
description: By the time Jim Thompson was sixteen years old he had been a newspaper boy a burlesque show hawker a plumber's helper a comedian in two-reel pictures a night bellboy in a luxury hotel and over a dozen other occupations. By the time he was eighteen he was driving across America in a broken-down Ford without a penny to his name and his mother and his kid sister Freddie in tow looking for just one more paycheck to keep them all alive.A bittersweet comedy of a hard-won American life ROUGHNECK chronicles the many jobs near-criminal escapades and downright unlawful grifts of the man who would become one of crime fiction's most enduring writers in a larger-than-life literary memoir--or wildly entertaining tall tale--as only Thompson could tell it. Hard times have never sounded so good.
language: English
title: Roughneck
publisher: Mulholland Books