William Lindsay Gresham
William Lindsay Gresham was born in Baltimore in 1909, "the descendant
of a family that settled in Maryland in 1641," according to the promotional
copy on the back of the paperback edition of Nightmare Alley. He
moved with his family to New York as a child, where he became fascinated
by the freaks and sideshows he saw at Coney Island. It is the dark side
of carnival life that continued to obsess him as an adult, and it is that
world which inspired his novel, Nightmare Alley, as well as the
handful of non-fiction books he wrote. 
Nightmare Alley belongs not to the hard-boiled world of Dashiell
Hammett and James M. Cain, but to the dark and shadowy world of noir.
As
a literary term, noir can be applied to any work--especially one involving
crime--that is notably dark, brooding, cynical, complex, and pessimistic.
Nightmare Alley is certainly all that and more, described by one
critic as "a tough, relentless, colorful novel that exposes the private
world of the freaks in order to comment on a sick, degrading society."
The novel depicts the rise of Stan Carlisle from a carnival mentalist to
a successful "spiritualist," preying on the rich and gullible
matrons of society, to his eventual fall and total disintegration. The
book sold fairly well, and was made into a striking and memorable film
starring Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell.
Gresham's depressed vision of society colored his private life as well; he was an alcoholic and an abusive husband to his wife Joy Davidman, as well as to their children. Joy eventually fled to England with their children, where she conducted a long-term love affair with the author C. S. Lewis, whom she eventually married (their story was recently told in the 1993 film Shadowlands). In 1962 Gresham committed suicide in a run-down hotel room in New York, where he had registered under the name "Asa Kimball, of Baltimore." The only tribute paid to him in the New York Times came from the bridge columnist.
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