Everything you need to understand or teach The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren.
Besides the social issues which arise from environment and the socioeconomic system, Algren pursues other more universal themes. Perhaps the most apparent is that of interconnectedness and interdependence. Cops and criminals are brothers — the same types, with a mutual understanding which unites them eternally against the "squares" who inhabit a world removed from elemental existence. Everyone "had been twisted about a bit" the narrator observes, so that the perversion or predilection of...