For the first time, the best work of a distinctive master of American noir is available in authoritative e-book editions from The Library of America. David Goodis experienced a brief celebrity when his novel Dark Passage (1946) became the basis for a popular movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The story of a man railroaded for his wife's murder and forced to assume a different identity after escaping from prison becomes in Goodis's hands a lyrical evocation of urban fear and loneliness. Other David Goodis novels available as Library of America E-Book Classics include: Nightfall, The Burglar, The Moon in the Gutter, and Street of No Return.

Among the pantheon of American crime writers-those masters of noir whose powerful vernacular style and dark and subversive themes transformed American culture and writing-David Goodis was a unique figure. Born in Philadelphia, he brought a jazzy, expressionist style and an almost hallucinatory intensity to his spare, passionate, uncompromising novels of mean streets and doomed people. Though little acknowledged during his lifetime, he has long enjoyed an international cult following, and his works have been adapted for the screen by directors including François Truffaut, Samuel Fuller, Jean-Jacques Beineix, and Jacques Tourneur.