Nelson Algren

Nelson Algren
Nelson Algren, 1956
Born	March 28, 1909(1909-03-28) Detroit, Michigan
Died	May 9, 1981(1981-05-09) (aged 72) Long Island, New York
Occupation	American novelist, Short story writer

Nelson Algren (March 28, 1909 – May 9, 1981) was an American writer.

Early life

Algren was born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Goldie (née Kalisher) and Gerson Abraham.^[1] At the age of three he moved with his parents to Chicago, Illinois where they lived in a working-class, immigrant neighborhood on the South Side. His father was the son of a Swedish convert to Judaism, and his mother (who owned a candy store) was of German Jewish descent. As a young child, Algren's family lived at 7139 S. South Park Avenue (now S. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive) in the Greater Grand Crossing section of the South Side. At the age of eight, Algren's family moved from the far South Side to an apartment at 4834 N. Troy Street in the North Side neighborhood of Albany Park. His father worked as an auto mechanic nearby on North Kedzie Avenue.^[2][3]

In one of the few autobiographical sections of his essay Chicago: City on the Make, Algren recalls after moving to Troy Street being teased by neighborhood children because he was a fan of the South Side White Sox, while they were fans of the North Side Chicago Cubs. They discovered his allegiances when he revealed his favorite player to be White Sox shortstop Swede Risberg. This teasing only increased when Risberg and other White Sox players were implicated in the 1920 Black Sox Scandal. Despite going on to spend most of his life on the North Side, Algren remained a White Sox fan into his later years.^[4]

Algren was educated in Chicago's public schools, graduated from Hibbard High School (now Roosevelt High School) and went on to study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in journalism during the Great Depression in 1931.^[2]

Literary career

Algren wrote his first story, "So Help Me", in 1933, while he was in Texas working at a gas station. Before returning home, he was caught stealing a typewriter from an abandoned classroom. For this, he spent nearly five months behind bars and faced a possible three additional years in jail. Fortunately for Algren, he was released, but the incident made a deep impression on him. It deepened his identification with outsiders, has-beens, and the general failures who later populated his fictional world.

Algren won the first of his three O. Henry Awards for his short story "The Brother's House" in 1935. The story had appeared in Story Magazine and was reprinted in an anthology of O. Henry Award winners.

Early novels

His first novel, Somebody in Boots, was published in 1935. Algren would later dismiss the book as primitive and politically naive, claiming he infused it with Marxist ideas he little understood as that was fashionable at the time. The book was not a success and went out print, which Algren later claimed was for the best, as he later reworked the material into his 1956 novel A Walk on the Wild Side which he claimed was a better work.

His second novel, Never Come Morning, published in 1942, portrayed the dead-end life of a doomed young Polish-American criminal. Ernest Hemingway, in a July 8, 1942 letter to Maxwell Perkins, said of Never Come Morning: "I think it very, very good. It is as fine and good stuff to come out of Chicago...." The novel offended members of Chicago's large Polish-American community, some of whose members denounced it as pro-Axis propaganda. Not knowing that Algren was a Jew whose real name was Nelson Abraham, certain incensed Polish-American Chicagoans falsely claimed he was pro-Nazi Nordic due to his Swedish surname (which was actually a pen name). His Polish American critics succeeded in getting the novel banned from the Chicago Public Library.

Golden years

Algren is probably best known for his 1949 novel The Man With the Golden Arm, which won the first National Book Award in 1950. The protagonist of the book, Frankie Machine, is an aspiring drummer who is a dealer in illicit card games. Frankie is trapped in demimonde Chicago, having picked up a morphine habit during his brief military service during World War II and married to a wife who he erroneously believes he crippled in a car accident.

His next book, Chicago, City on the Make (1951), was a scathing essay that outraged the city's boosters but beautifully presented the back alleys of the town, its dispossessed, its corrupt politicians and its swindlers, but in it he also declares his love of the City as a "lovely so real."

The Man With the Golden Arm was made into a successful 1955 movie starring Frank Sinatra directed by Otto Preminger, who also produced the picture. Algren loathed the film and sued Preminger for monies he claimed he was owed.

In 1956, Algren was to have his last mainstream success with the novel A Walk on the Wild Side. The book was a reworking of his first novel Somebody in Boots and material from several short stories, most notably his 1947 piece "The Face on the Barroom Floor". The novel about a wandering Texan adrift during the early years of the Great Depression was adapted into the 1962 movie Walk on the Wild Side, which bowlderized his book. The movie was not a success.

Legacy

Algren articulated the world of "drunks, pimps, prostitutes, freaks, drug addicts, prize fighters, corrupt politicians, and hoodlums". Art Shay wrote years later about how Algren had written a poem from the perspective of a "halfy", street slang for a legless man on wheels.^[5] The protagonist talks about "how forty wheels rolled over his legs and how he was ready to strap up and give death a wrestle".^[5] Shay wrote that Algren later commented that this poem was probably key to everything he had ever written.^[5]

Influence

In the fall of 1955, Algren was interviewed for the Paris Review by rising author Terry Southern. Algren and Southern became friends through this meeting and remained in touch for many years. Algren became one of Southern's most enthusiastic early supporters, and when he taught creative writing in later years he often used Southern as an example of a great short story writer.^[6]

Hurricane Carter and Paterson, New Jersey

In 1975, Algren was commissioned to write a magazine article about the trial of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, the prize fighter who had been found guilty of double murder. While researching the article, Algren visited Carter's hometown of Paterson, New Jersey. Algren was instantly fascinated by the city of Paterson and he immediately decided to move there. In the summer of 1975, Algren sold off most of his belongings, left Chicago, and moved into an apartment in Paterson.^[7]

Posthumous works

The article about Carter had grown into a novel, The Devil's Stocking, which was published posthumously in 1983.^[8]

In 1994 the book Nonconformity was published, presenting Algren's view of the difficulties surrounding the 1956 film adaptation of The Man With the Golden Arm. Nonconformity also presents the belief system behind Algren's writing and a call to writers everywhere to investigate the dark and represent the ignored.

In 2009, the novel fragment Entrapment was published along with other unpublished Algren fiction and reportage as Entrapment and Other Writings by Seven Stories Press.

WWII military service and Vietnam

Algren served as a private in the European Theater of World War II as a litter bearer. Despite being a college graduate, he was denied entry into Officer Candidate School. There is conjecture that this may have been due to suspicion regarding his political beliefs, although his criminal conviction would have most likely excluded him from OCS.

According to Bettina Drew in her 1989 biography Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side, Algren had no desire to serve in the war but was drafted in 1943. An indifferent soldier, he actively dealt on the black market while stationed in France. He received a bad beating by some fellow black marketeers.

In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.^[9]

Ironically, according to Drew's biography, Algren angled for a journalism job in South Vietnam. Strapped for cash more than a decade after his only two commercially successful novels, he saw Vietnam as an opportunity to make money, not from journalism fees, but from dealing on the black market.

Feud with James Purdy and questions about sexuality

In 1967, he wrote an outraged review of James Purdy's Eustace Chisholm and the Works, which dealt with homosexuality. Purdy later commented that Algren's violent attack was a case of self-hatred and revealed deep problems about his own identity.^[10]

Death and honors

Medal of Merit & Academy Membership

In 1975, Algren left Chicago for Patterson, New Jersey, where he lived for five years. In 1980, he moved to a house in Sag Harbor, Long Island. Three months before he died of a heart attack at home on May 9, 1981, he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He previously had been awarded the Award of Merit Medal for the novel in 1974 by the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the forerunner to the Academy. (Algren previously had won an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the Institute in 1947.)

O. Henry Awards

Algren won his first O. Henry Award for his short story "The Brother's House" (published in Story Magazine) in 1935. His short stories "A Bottle of Milk for Mother (Biceps)" (published in the Southern Review) and "The Captain is Impaled" (Harper's Magazine) were O. Henry Award winners in 1941 and 1950, respectively. ^[11] None of the stories won the first, second or third place awards but were included in the annual collection of O. Henry Award stories.

Fountain

Nelson was also honored in 1998 with a fountain dedicated in his name^[12] located in Chicago's Polish Triangle, in what had been the heart of Polish Downtown, the area that figured as the inspiration for much of his work. Appropriately enough, Division Street, Algren's favorite street as well as the onetime Polish Broadway runs right past it.^[5]

Personal life

Dunes cottage where Algren and de Beauvoir summered in Miller Beach, Indiana.

Nelson Algren married Amanda Kontowicz in 1937. He had met her at a party celebrating the publication of Somebody in Boots. They eventually would divorce and remarry before divorcing a second and final time.

Algren had an affair with Simone de Beauvoir. The couple summered together in Algren's cottage in the lake front community of Miller Beach, Indiana and also traveled to Latin America together in 1949. In her novel The Mandarins (1957), Beauvoir wrote of Algren (who is 'Lewis Brogan' in the book):

At first I found it amusing meeting in the flesh that classic American species: self-made leftist writer. Now, I began taking an interest in Brogan. Through his stories, you got the feeling that he claimed no rights to life and that nevertheless he had always had a passionate desire to live. I liked that mixture of modesty and eagerness.

Algren expected the world's most famous feminist to love him in a traditional way, with the man being dominant, but Beauvoir's relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre dominated her life. The couple eventually became disenchanted with each other and a bitter Algren wrote of them, in a Playboy Magazine article about a trip he took to North Africa with Beauvoir, that she and Sartre were bigger users of others than a prostitute and her pimp in their way.

In 1965, he met Betty Ann Jones while teaching at the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop. They married that year and divorced in 1967.^[13] According to Kurt Vonnegut, who taught with him at Iowa in '65, Algren's "enthusiasm for writing, reading and gambling left little time for the duties of a married man."^[14]

Political views and FBI surveillance

Algren friend Stuart McCarrell described him as a "gut radical," who generally sided with the downtrodden but was uninterested in ideological debates and politically inactive for most of his life. McCarrell states that Algren's heroes were the "prairie radicals" Theodore Dreiser, John Peter Altgeld, Clarence Darrow and Eugene V. Debs.^[15] Algren references all of these men—as well as Big Bill Haywood, the Haymarket defendants and the Memorial Day Massacre victims--in Chicago: City on the Make.

Despite its appeal to artists and intellectuals during the Great Depression, Algren told McCarrell that he never joined the Communist Party. Among other reasons, he cited negative experiences both he and Richard Wright had with party members.^[15] However, his involvement in groups deemed "subversive" during the McCarthy years drew the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Among his affiliations, he was a participant in the John Reed Club in the 1930s and later an honorary co-chair of the "Save Ethel and Julius Rosenberg Committee" in Chicago.^[16][17] According to Herbert Mitgang, the FBI suspected Algren's political views and kept a dossier on him amounting to more than 500 pages but identified nothing concretely subversive.^[18]

During the 1950s, Algren wished to travel to Paris with his romantic companion, Simone de Beauvoir, but due to government surveillance his passport applications were denied.^[17] When he finally did get a passport in 1960, McCarrell concludes that "it was too late. By then the relationship [with de Beauvoir] had changed subtly but decisively."^[15]

Algren and Chicago Polonia

Algren described Ashland Avenue as figuratively connecting Chicago to Warsaw in Poland.^[5] His own life involved the Polish community of Chicago in many ways, including his second wife Amanda Kontowicz. His friend Art Shay wrote about Algren, who while gambling, listened to old Polish love songs sung by an elderly waitress.^[19] The city's Polish Downtown, where he lived for years, played a significant part in his literary output. Polish bars that Algren frequented in his gambling, such as the Bit of Poland on Milwaukee Avenue, figured in such writings as Never Come Morning and The Man With the Golden Arm.^[5]

His novel Never Come Morning was published several years after the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, a period when Poles, like Jews, were labeled an inferior race by Nazi ideology.^[4] Chicago's Polish-American leaders thought Never Come Morning played on these anti-Polish stereotypes, and launched a sustained campaign against the book through the Polish press, the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America, and other Polish-American institutions. Articles appeared in the local Polish newspapers and letters were sent to Mayor Ed Kelly, the Chicago Public Library, and Algren's publisher, Harper & Brothers. The general tone of the campaign is suggested by a Zgoda editorial that attacked his character and mental state, saw readers who got free copies as victims of a Nazi-financed plot, and said the novel proved a deep desire to harm ethnic Poles on Algren's part. The Polish American Council sent a copy of a resolution condemning the novel to the FBI. Algren and his publisher defended against these accusations, with the author telling a library meeting that the book was about the effects of poverty, regardless of national background. The mayor had the novel removed from the Chicago Public Library system, and it apparently remained absent for at least 20 years.^[4] At least two later efforts to commemorate Algren in Polish Downtown echoed the attacks on the novels.

Shortly after his death in 1981, his last Chicago residence at 1958 West Evergreen Street was noted by Chicago journalist Mike Royko. The walk-up apartment just east of Damen Avenue in the former Polish Downtown neighborhood of West Town was in an area that had been dominated by Polish immigrants and was once one of Chicago's toughest and most crowded neighborhoods. The renaming of Evergreen Street to Algren Street caused controversy and was almost immediately reversed.^[20]

In 1998, Algren enthusiasts instigated the renaming after Algren of the Polish Triangle in what had been the center of the Polish Downtown. Replacing the plaza's traditional name, the director of the Polish Museum of America predicted, would obliterate the history of Chicago ethnic Poles and insult ethnic Polish institutions and local businesses. In the end a compromise was reached where the Triangle kept its older name and a newly installed fountain was named after Algren and inscribed with a quotation about the city's working people protecting its essence, from Algren's essay "Chicago: City on the Make".^[4]

Hoax broadcast

A passage featured in Algren's 1983 book The Devil's Stocking was broadcast on TV some six years earlier during the Southern Television hoax which generated international publicity when students^[21] interrupted the regular broadcast through the Hannington transmitter of the Independent Broadcasting Authority in England for six minutes on 26 November 1977.^[22] Issue No. 24 of Fortean Times^[23] (Winter 1977) transcribed the hoaxer's message as:

"This is the voice of Asteron. I am an authorized representative of the Intergalactic Mission and I have a message for the planet Earth. We are beginning to enter the period of Aquarius and there are many corrections which have to be made by Earth people. All your weapons of evil must be destroyed. You have only a short time to live to learn to live together in peace. You must live in peace or leave the galaxy."

The Devil's Stocking is Algren's fictionalized account of the trial of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, a real-life prize-fighter who had been found guilty of double murder, about whom Algren had written a magazine article for Esquire in 1975. In the book, as a period of unrest within the prison begins, the character 'Kenyatta' gives a speech closely mirroring the Fortean Times transcript of the 1977 hoax, and those of other American newspaper reports of the broadcast. The passage in Algren's book says:

"I am an authorized representative of the Intergalactic Mission," Kenyatta finally disclosed his credentials. "I have a message for the Planet Earth. We are beginning to enter the period of Aquarius. Many corrections have to be made by Earth people. All your weapons of evil must be destroyed. You have only a short time to learn to live together in peace. You must live in peace" - here he paused to gain everybody's attention - "you must live in peace or leave the galaxy!" ^[24]

References in popular culture

• In Jerry Kamstra's 1975 book The Frisco Kid, Jerry's mentally challenged friend Scott pulls him aside and forces Jerry to promise to him that he will read Nelson Algren because "he is the one American author that hasn't sold out yet, kid."
• In his 1967 novella, Trout Fishing in America, Richard Brautigan writes about crating up and mailing a crippled wino (Trout Fishing in America Shorty) to Nelson Algren.
• Leonard Cohen used images from The Man with the Golden Arm in "The Stranger Song," from his first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967): "you've seen that man before: his golden arm dispatching cards, but now it's rusted from the elbows to the finger."
• In the documentary Classic Albums: Lou Reed: Transformer, musician Lou Reed says that Algren's 1956 novel, A Walk on the Wild Side, was the launching point for his song of the same name.
• According to the liner notes of The Tubes' second album, Young and Rich, A Walk on the Wild Side is the inspiration for their song "Pimp."
• In 2000, John Susman's play Nelson & Simone was produced at Chicago’s Live Bait Theatre, directed by Richard Cotovsky,^[25] and starring Gary Houston and Rebecca Covey. The play dramatizes the love affair between Algren and Simone de Beauvoir.^[26]
• The 2002 album Adult World by guitarist Wayne Kramer (founding member of the Detroit band MC5) contains a song titled "Nelson Algren Stopped By," in which guest band X-Mars-X provides a shuffling jazz background while Kramer reads a prose poem about walking the streets of present-day Chicago with Algren.
• The Minnesota based punk-rock band Dillinger Four quote Algren as an inspiration in the song "Doublewhiskeycokenoice" from their album Midwestern Songs of the Americas. In that song Patrick Costello sings "Nelson Algren came to me and said, 'Celebrate the ugly things' / The beat-up side of what they call pride could be the measure of these days."
• In 2005 The Hold Steady mentioned Algren in the song "Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night" from the Separation Sunday album. The first line of the song is "Nelson Algren came to Paddy at some party at the Dead End Alley/He told him what to celebrate" and toward the end the song goes "Hey Nelson Algren. Chicago seemed tired last night/They had cigarettes where there were supposed to be eyes." The name 'Paddy' in the song is a reference to Patrick Costello and the 'Dead End Alley' is the name of the house where the Dillinger Four's members used to live.
• In 2011, literary publication 3:AM Magazine named Algren a cult hero.^[27]

Nelson Algren Award

Each year the Chicago Tribune gives a Nelson Algren award for short fiction. Winners are published in the newspaper and given $5,000. The award is viewed with more than a little irony by Algren admirers; the Tribune panned Algren's work in his lifetime, referring to Chicago: City on the Make as a "highly scented object." In an afterword to that book, Algren accused the Tribune of imposing false viewpoints on the city and promoting mediocrity.

Studs Terkel, writer Warren Leming, and three others founded the Nelson Algren Committee in 1989. At the time, there was a renewed interest in Algren's work. Somebody in Boots and Never Come Morning, both long out-of-print, had been republished in 1987. The first biography of Algren, Bettina Drew's Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side, was published in 1989 by Putnam. All of Nelson Algren's words are now back in print.

The Committee awards community activists an annual Algren award and sponsors an Algren birthday party. Leming's song "Algren Street"' can be downloaded from the Committee's website. The site also contains the short film Algren's Last Night, written by Leming and directed by Carmine Cervi.

Quotes

"It is strange how fragile this man-creature is.....in one second he's just garbage. Garbage, that's all."

"I don't recommend being a bachelor, but it helps if you want to write."

"The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D."

"(Chicago is) the only major city in the country where you can easily buy your way out of a murder rap."

"Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own." From A Walk on the Wild Side (1956)

"Yet once you've come to be part of this particular patch [Chicago], you'll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real." From Chicago: City on the Make (1951)

"My feeling was although the Nazis had to be beaten, because of what they stood for, this didn't necessarily mean that we believed in exactly the opposite, that, if we won the war, then everything was going to be as it should be." From Conversations with Nelson Algren (1964)

"I am the penny whistle of American literature." (comment to Kurt Vonnegut about being cheated out of the profits of The Man With the Golden Arm film)

Bibliography

• Somebody in Boots (1935)
• Never Come Morning (1942)
• The Neon Wilderness (1947), a collection of short stories
• The Man with the Golden Arm (1949), concerns morphine addiction
• Chicago: City on the Make (1951)
• A Walk on the Wild Side (1956)
• Nelson Algren's Own Book of Lonesome Monsters (1962)
• Who Lost an American? (1963)
• Conversations with Nelson Algren (1964)
• Notes from a Sea Diary: Hemingway All the Way (1965)
• The Last Carousel (1973)
• The Devil's Stocking (1983)
• America Eats (1992)
• He Swung and He Missed (1993)
• Nonconformity (1994)
• The Texas Stories of Nelson Algren (1994)
• Notes From a Sea Diary & Who Lost an American (Seven Stories Press, 2009)
• Entrapment and Other Writings (Seven Stories Press, 2009)

References

16^http://www.cychron.com/the-man-with-the-golden-pen-1.1621010

External links

• Works by or about Nelson Algren in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Alston Anderson & Terry Southern (Winter 1955). "Nelson Algren, The Art of Fiction No. 11". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4987/the-art-of-fiction-no-11-nelson-algren. 
• Flanagan, Richard (29 January 2006). "Prophet of the neon wilderness". The Daily Telegraph (London). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3649694/Prophet-of-the-neon-wilderness.html. 
• NelsonAlgren.org
• Writers Influenced By Algren
• Clips of Barry Gifford and Willem Dafoe reading from Algren's work
• Nelson Algren Papers at The Newberry Library
• Nelson Algren quotes on Twitter