By the time Jim Thompson was 16 years old, he had been a newspaper boy, a burlesque show hawker, a plumber's helper, a comedian in two-reel pictures, a night bellboy in a luxury hotel, and over a dozen other occupations. By the time he was 18, he was driving across America in a broken-down Ford without a penny to his name and his mother and his kid sister Freddie in tow, looking for just one more paycheck to keep them all alive.

A bittersweet comedy of a hard-won American life, Roughneck chronicles the many jobs, near-criminal escapades, and downright unlawful grifts of the man who would become one of crime fiction's most enduring writers, in a larger-than-life literary memoir - or wildly entertaining tall tale - as only Thompson could tell it. Hard times have never sounded so good.