Jim Thompson wrote some of the darkest, boldest, and most celebrated modern crime novels, including The Grifters and The Killer Inside Me. In Savage Art, Robert Polito provides the first comprehensive biography of this brilliant American original. Combining exhaustive research with novelistic fluency, Polito reproduces the vital textures of Thompson's world and provides the first thorough chronicle of his private and public history, tracing Thompson's dramatization of his innermost life in the "savage art" of his surprisingly personal novels. A vivid and compelling reclamation of a lost American writer, Savage Art is also a stunning addition to the literary annals of twentieth-century America.