Introduction by Kurt Vonnegut 'The best book to come out of Chicago' - Ernest Hemmingway '...depicts the intensity of feeling, the tawdry but potent dreams, the crude but forceful poetry, and the frustrated longing for human dignity residing in the lives of Poles of Chicago's Northwest Side, and the revelation informs us all that there lies an ocean of life at our doorstep - an unharnessed, unchanneled, and unknown ocean' - Richard Wright More than a million copies sold of this classic!