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Thread: William Lindsay Gresham

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Oct 2007
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    William Lindsay Gresham

    September 14,1962: William Lindsay Gresham, suicide. Fiction and non-fiction writer who specialized in magic, freak shows and carnivals, most famous for noir novel Nightmare Alley and Harry Houdini biography Houdini: The Man Who Walked Through Walls. In 1947 Alley was adapted into a cult film noir starring Tyrone Power. Joy Gresham, Gresham's second wife (out of three), became famous in her own right when she moved to England to escape Gresham's abuse and ended up falling in love and marrying writer C.S. Lewis, whose own writing was miles away the freaks and geeks of William Gresham. Their story (minus William) was dramatized in the play and movie Shadowlands (Anthony Hopkins as Lewis, Debra Winger as Joy Gresham). In 1962 William Gresham discovered he had cancer of the tongue and proceeded to kill himself in a New York City hotel room, where he registered as Asa Kimball, a character in one of his novels. Gresham was 43 years old.


  2. #2
    Danny62 Guest
    In 1962, Gresham took a turn for the worse. He had started to go blind and had been diagnosed with cancer of the tongue. On Sept 14, 1962, he checked into the Dixie Hotel â?? the same hotel he had hung out around when he wrote Nightmare Alley over a decade earlier. There, he took his life with an overdose of Sleeping pills. His death went generally unnoticed by the New York press, but for a mention by a bridge columnist.

  3. #3
    Kathyf Guest
    Never heard of him Thanks very interesting.

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