Man Drowning, first published in hardback by Harper & Brothers in 1952, is a noir tale. Nick Banning, the book’s narrator, is a blue-collar war vet. He has problems, chief among them his almost uncontrollable anger and his obsessive love of a woman named Sherry, to whom he was once married. He finds Sherry in Arizona and tries to convince her, and himself, that he’s changed, that his obsession with her won’t lead him to do the kinds of things he did in the past. Sherry knows better, Nick knows better, the reader knows better, and his downward spiral has already begun.