William Lindsay Gresham

William Lindsay Gresham
Born	August 20, 1909 Baltimore, Maryland
Died	September 14, 1962 (age 53)
Categories	Books by William Lindsay Gresham

William Lindsay Gresham (b.1909-d.1962) was an American novelist and non-fiction author particularly regarded among readers of noir. His best-known work is Nightmare Alley (1946) and a biography of Houdini, Houdini: The Man Who Walked Through Walls (1959)

Biography

Gresham was born in Baltimore, Maryland, but moved to New York with his family as a child, where he became fascinated by the sideshow at Coney Island. Upon graduating from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn in 1926, Gresham drifted from job to job. In 1937, Gresham served as a volunteer medic for the Loyalist forces during the Spanish Civil War. There, he befriended a former sideshow employee, Joseph Daniel "Doc" Halliday, and their long conversations inspired much of his work, particularly Gresham's two books about the American carnival, the nonfiction Monster Midway and the fictional Nightmare Alley.

Gresham developed a deep interest in Spiritualism, having already exposed many of the fraudulent techniques of popular spiritualists in his two sideshow-themed books and having authored a book about Houdini with the assistance of noted skeptic James Randi.

He was a member of IBM Ring 45 in Miami, Florida. His close friends were magicians Randi, Bruce Elliott, Jay Marshall, Roy Benson, Clayton Rawson and Fred Keating. He admired Ted Annemann and spent six months practicing his billet switch until he had it perfect.

"Punch Line" was story published posthumously in Rogue magazine by its executive editor by Bruce Elliott.

Bibliography

• Nightmare Alley (1946)
• "Fortune Tellers Never Starve", Esquire Magazine, November 1949
• Limbo Tower (1949)
• "How Houdini Did It", True Magazine, December 1954.
• Monster Midway: An Uninhibited Look at the Glittering World of the Carny (1954)
• "Education for Magic" in Ireland's Yearbook (1955)
• " The Man No Lock Could Hold", World Digest, October 1958
• Houdini: The Man Who Walked Through Walls (1959)
• The Book of Strength: Body Building the Safe, Correct Way (1962)

References

This page incorporated content from William Lindsay Gresham, a page hosted on Wikipedia. Please consult the history of the original page to see a list of its authors. Therefor, this article is also available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License

• William Lindsay Gresham - An Appreciation by Robert Lund Abra September 29, 1962