Nelson Algren wrote short stories and two great novels set in the 1930s and 1940s in the Chicago neighborhood that I live in. The Man With the Golden Arm is the most famous of the novels.
But how has it taken me so long to read Never Come Morning, which contains passages like this description of his young, poor 17-year-old protagonist, Bruno "Lefty" Bicek:
His life was a ceaseless series of lusts: for tobacco so good he could eat it like meat; for meat, for coffee, for bread, for sleep, for whisky, for women, for dice games and ball games and personal triumphs in public places. Day and night, one or all of these rode him, and was never fully satisfied even for a while; they could no more be satisfied than they could be evaded.
If you read anything better than that today pass it along.