An American writer best known for The Man with the Golden Arm (1949) which was later adapted as a 1955 film of the same name.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s he was one of the best known literary writers in America, lover of Simone de Beauvoir and 'hero' of her novel The Mandarins. He is still considered something of a bard of the down-and-out because of this book and the novel A Walk on the Wild Side (made even more famous by Lou Reed).