William Lindsay Gresham was born in Baltimore on August 20, 1909. His family moved
briefly to Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1916, then to New York City, where he graduated
from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn in 1926. 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 is the author of more than fifteen books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. His most recent novel is Under Tiberius. He has long been working on a book about William Lindsay Gresham. He lives in New York City.