New York World-Telegram and the Sun staff photographer: Albertin, Walter, photographer. · Public domain

Won the first National Book Award for fiction in 1950 for The Man with the Golden Arm, a novel about addiction and the Chicago underworld that became a 1955 film, cementing his reputation as, in one critic's words, America's "bard of the down-and-outer." His novel A Walk on the Wild Side and his affair with French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, who wrote him into her novel The Mandarins, made him as much a literary character as a literary figure in his own right.