Robert Polito 
Savage Art pbk March 1997 
About the Author  
Bibliography 

Savage Art - A biography of Jim Thompson 
Shortly before his death on April 7th 1977, Jim Thompson instructed his wife Alberta to safeguard his novels, manuscripts, papers and copyrights. 'Just you wait,' he promised her, 'I'll become famous after I'm dead about ten years.' 
In this highly-acclaimed biography, combining exhaustive research with novelistic style, Robert Polito explores the elements of Thompson's history and life that combined to make him an art savage, and his such a savage art. 
Savage Art was awarded the US National Book Critics Circle Award. 
Praise for Savage Art  
'Robert Polito brilliantly riffs off Jim Thompson's life and gives us the world he lived in. This is a terrific - and terrifically entertaining book.' James Ellroy 
'Detailed, readable, and fascinating, this book is about more than the writer of brilliant crime novels. Yet even as it "places" Jim Thompson in American history, he also escapes into it- and his escape is a major part of Robert Polito's cunning account.' Thom Gunn 
'The art of Jim Thompson was always a tightrope act, those first- person sadist heroes settling a lot of the writer's psychic debts. Drunk, he would babble on in an agony of guilt about his sheriff father's demise in an old people's home, inventing a death by swallowing mattress stuffing. Not a head you'd want, though you might envy the prose. A great biography.' Brian Case, Time Out 
'A brilliantly conceived biography of a writer whose dark vision of humanity left an indelible mark on the crime fiction of this century... Savage Art offers a road map of human struggle with all its failures and small, hard-won victories.' Washington Post

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 
Robert Polito coedited and introduced , an anthology of Thompson's "lost writings". He is director of the writing program at the New School for Social Research and lives in New York City. Savage Art was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY  

• Fireworks
• Doubles (a book of poems)
• A Reader's Guide to James Merrill's "The Changing Light at Sandover"
• Savage Art (Serpent 's Tail pbk March 1997)

All books in print can be ordered at the TANGLED WEB