Nelson Algren

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Nelson Algren

(born March 28, 1909, Detroit, Mich., U.S. — died May 9, 1981, Sag Harbor, N.Y.) U.S. writer. The son of a machinist, Algren grew up in Chicago and worked his way through the University of Illinois during the Great Depression. His novels of the poor skillfully capture the mood of the city's underside and are lifted from routine naturalism by his vision of his characters' pride, humour, and unquenchable yearnings. Among his popular successes were The Man with the Golden Arm (1949; film, 1956) and A Walk on the Wild Side (1956; film, 1962). He also published an admired short-story collection, The Neon Wilderness (1947).

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The American author Nelson Algren (1909-1981) wrote novels and short stories about underworld characters, often set in the slums of Chicago.

Nelson Algren has been called the poet of the under-world. His characters are the pimps and pushers, clowns and con-men, hustlers and hookers, lushes and junkies, grotesqueries and freaks - in short, the born losers of the world who live in what he called "the neon wilderness." For more than half of his works the seamy streets of Chicago are his setting. His social realism has been compared to two other authors who wrote of the Chicago slums, Richard Wright (Native Son) and James T. Farrell (the Studs Lonigan series). Algren's work represents a continuation of the American realism begun with Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Frank Norris' McTeague, and Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie.

So downbeat is his fiction that one of his most remembered lines is the closing of his frequently anthologized short story "A Bottle of Milk for Mother" in which a young murderer confesses his crime. "I knew I'd never get to be twenty-one anyhow," he tells himself. That short story became part of his second novel, Never Come Morning (1942), about a Chicago South Side prizefighter-hoodlum. It was only a little more commercially successful than his scarcely noticed first novel, Somebody in Boots (1935), about the end of a Texas family of misfits.

Algren is best known for his novel The Man with the Golden Arm (1949), which won the National Book Award and was made into a successful motion picture by Otto Preminger starring Frank Sinatra. It is the story of a professional gambler with a "lucky" arm and a morphine addiction, "a monkey on his back," a phrase Algren heard in the streets and made popular by using it in his novel.

A Walk on the Wild Side (1956), also made into a film, is a sequel to The Man with the Golden Arm and, like Somebody in Boots, is about a rustic from a Texas town. Critics felt that it was more than a re-writing of his first novel in that here Algren tightened his prose and laced it with comic interludes of Rabelaisian hilarity. But still there is the loser's mentality and Algren's gloomy humor. "Sometimes I almost think it'd be money in my pocket if I'd never been born," one of his characters remarks in A Walk on the Wild Side.

Born Nelson Algren Abraham of Jewish, Swedish, and German ancestry in Detroit on March 28, 1909, he grew up in Chicago after his father, a machinist, moved his family there when Nelson was three years old. He lived in ethnic blue-collar neighborhoods of the city and worked his way through the University of Illinois, majoring in journalism and graduating in 1931.

Unable to find work during the Great Depression, he traveled south to New Orleans and Texas, visiting areas that served as the background of his first novel. During his days as a drifter he hustled at a carnival, worked in a service station, and peddled goods as a door-to-door salesman.

It was while he was in Texas that he decided to be a writer. His first step was to steal a typewriter and head back to Chicago. Like the characters in his subsequent stories, he was caught and arrested. He spent four months in jail in Alpine, Texas. The experience gave him material for future stories. When he returned to Chicago he sold one set in a Texas filling station to Story magazine.

During World War II he served in the European theater and, again in the fashion of his characters, he emerged as he had entered, a private. He was married twice and divorced each time.

At one point in his life he began a romance with Simone de Beauvoir, the French feminist writer, whom he came to know through a friend who was a French translator. The night Algren met de Beauvoir, he took her to a seedy bar in the Chicago Bowery where they watched drunken old men and women dance to a small band. Later they visited a homeless shelter. The following day Algren took his enthusiastic new friend to see the electric chair, psychiatric wards, cheap burlesque shows, police line-ups, and the city zoo. Subsequently she went to Mexico with him and he visited her in Paris. De Beauvoir wrote about their relationship in several of her books and dedicated The Mandarins (1956) to him. He dedicated a book of essays to her. Although she returned to her long-time companion, Jean-Paul Sartre, she was buried wearing Algren's ring.

Algren had one other famous supporter, Ernest Hemingway, who selected him as second only to Faulkner among leading American authors of his day. Curiously, Faulkner and Algren were counterparts in another way. In 1986 the Modern Language Association reported hundreds of articles written on the southern writer with but two on Algren. Yet the Federal Bureau of Investigation's files on Algren outnumber those on Faulkner by 546 pages to 18, indicating a greater interest in the Chicago writer by J. Edgar Hoover and his staff than by literary scholars, many of whom objected to Algren's subject matter. The critic Leslie Fiedler called him "the bard of the stumblebum," and Norman Podhoretz complained that he romanticized hustlers and prostitutes. One of his works, however, The Neon Wilderness (1947), a collection of 20 short stories, received generally high critical acclaim.

Algren's last novel, The Devil's Stocking (1983), about a black boxer accused of a triple homicide and based on the life of boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, was published posthumously. It had been written after Algren moved east in 1974, living first in New Jersey and later in Sag Harbor, New York.

On May 8, 1981, he complained of pains in his chest and his doctor recommended that he go into nearby Southampton Hospital, but Algren refused, saying that on the following day he was having a party to celebrate his entry into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an honor which had come to him belatedly. On the morning of his party a friend discovered him dead, lying face-up on his bathroom floor.

Like Chekhov, whose dead body was mistakenly placed in a freight car marked "Fresh Oysters" on route to the cemetery, Algren suffered further indignities after he died. When his tombstone arrived, his name was spelled wrong and had to be re-cut. Then the City of Chicago named a street after him, but residents complained that the new name caused them too much bother, so West Algren Street, like its namesake, vanished from the scene.

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

Early life

Algren was born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham in Detroit, Michigan. 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 a Jewish American woman, as his mother (who owned a candy store) was of German Jewish descent. When Algren was eight years old, his parents moved from 7139 S. South Park Avenue (now S. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive) in the far South Side neighborhood of St. Columbanus to an apartment in the Albany Park neighborhood on the North Side. Algren's father worked as an auto mechanic nearby on North Kedzie Avenue.

Algren was educated in Chicago's public schools, graduated from Hibbard High School (now Roosevelt), 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.

Career

He 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.

His first novel, Somebody in Boots, was published in 1935. Never Come Morning, published in 1942, portrayed the dead-end life of a doomed young criminal.

Algren served as a private in the European Theater of WWII 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 Algren's political beliefs, although in any event his criminal conviction would have most likely excluded him from OSC.

He 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.^[1] The protagonist talks about "how forty wheels rolled over his legs and how he was ready to strap up and give death a wrestle".^[1] Shay wrote that Algren later commented that this poem was probably key to everything he had ever written.^[1]

He is probably best known for his 1950 National Book Award winning The Man With the Golden Arm. 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.

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.^[2]

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.

In 1980, Algren moved into a house on Long Island, in New York state. He died of a heart attack the following year.

The article about Carter had grown into a novel, The Devil's Stocking, which was published posthumuously in 1983.^[3]

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.

Nelson was also honored in 1998 with a fountain dedicated in his name^[4] 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.^[1]

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.

Personal life

Algren had an affair with Simone de Beauvoir and they travelled to Latin America together in 1949. In her novel The Mandarins (1957), she 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.

FBI surveillance

According to Herbert Mitgang, the Federal Bureau of Investigation suspected Algren's political views and kept a dossier on him amounting to more than 500 pages, but identified nothing concretely subversive.^[5]

Algren and Chicago Polonia

Algren described Ashland Avenue as figuratively connecting Chicago to Warsaw in Poland.^[1] His own life involved the Polish community of Chicago in many ways, including his Polish second wife Amanda Kontowicz. His friend Art Shay wrote about Algren, while gambling, listening to old Polish love songs sung by an elderly waitress.^[6] 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.^[1]

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 as inferior as a race by Nazi ideology.^[7] 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.^[7] A flood^[vague] of 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.^[7] 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.^[7] The Polish American Council sent a copy of a resolution condemning the novel to the FBI.^[7] 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.^[7] The mayor had the novel removed from the Chicago Public Library system, and it apparently remained absent for at least 20 years.^[7]

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 taken note of 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.^[8]

In 1998, Algren enthusiasts instigated the renaming after Algren 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.^[7] 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, circling the fountain's base, with a quotation about the city's working people protecting its essence, from Algren's essay "Chicago: City on the Make".^[7]

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^[9] interrupted the regular broadcast through the Hannington transmitter of the Independent Broadcasting Authority in England for six minutes on 26 November 1977. ^[10] Issue No 24 of Fortean Times^[11] (Winter 1977) transcribed the hoaxer's message as:

"This is the voice of Asteron. I am an authorised 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 fictionalised 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 (factual) magazine article for Esquire (magazine) in 1975. In the (fictional) 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!" ^[12]

References in popular culture

Ernest Hemingway, in his 8 July 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...."
In the 1975 Jerry Kamstra 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.
The 2002 album Adult World by guitarist Wayne Kramer (founding member of the Detroit band MC5) contains a song entitled 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 quotes 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."
"Pimp" is a song on The Tubes second album, Young and Rich. According to the original liner notes, A Walk on the Wild Side was an inspiration.
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 towards the end the song goes "Hey Nelson Algren. Chicago seemed tired last nite/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 2005 an alternative rock band named "Algren" formed in Chicago, IL inspired by the life of the author and his conflicted relationship with the city.

Nelson Algren Award

Each year the Chicago Tribune newspaper 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 all of Algren's work was out of print. All of it is 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, 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)

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

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f Shay, Art. Nelson Algren's Chicago, University of Illinois Press 1988, p. 118
^ Hill, Lee - A Grand Guy: The Life and Art of Terry Southern (Bloomsbury, 2001), pp.63-64
^ Nelson Algren Biography, Nelson Algren Biography. November 20, 2006.
^ [1]
^ Mitgang, Herbert, Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest Authors, NY: Donald I. Fine, Inc. 1988
^ Shay, p. 119
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ Jeff Huebner, "Full Nelson", Chicago Reader, November 20, 1998
^ Lévy, Bernard-Henri. In the Footsteps of Tocqueville, The Atlantic Monthly, May 2005
^ Paulu, Burton (October 1981). Television and radio in the United Kingdom. University of Minnesota Press. pp. 179-180. ISBN 978-0816609413. http://books.google.com/books?id=_lv7awDml10C&pg=PA179&dq=Vrillon&lr=#v=onepage&q=Vrillon&f=false.
^ "'Galactic' hoax startles viewers", The Daily Collegian, 2 December 1977, http://digitalnewspapers.libraries.psu.edu/Default/Skins/BasicArch/Client.asp?Skin=BasicArch&&AppName=2&enter=true&BaseHref=DCG/1977/12/02&EntityId=Ar01803, retrieved 2009-09-13
^ Diary of a Mad Planet: Fortean Times Issues 16-25. John Brown Publishing Ltd. 1995. ISBN 1-870021-25-8. http://www.google.com/books?id=06m7AAAACAAJ&dq=diary+of+a+mad+planet&ei=9X2uSvuDB5qEkASfoISXAw.
^ Algren, Nelson (September 1983). The Devil's Stocking. Arbor House Publishing Company. ISBN 978-0877955481. http://books.google.com/books?lr=&ei=ETmuSp3dD5SCNtT5ibgN&id=ejFaAAAAMAAJ&dq=%22All+your+weapons+of+evil+must+be+destroyed%22&q=%22your+weapons+of+evil%22.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Nelson Algren

The Paris Review Interview
Prophet of the neon wilderness from the Daily Telegraph, 29 January 2006.
NelsonAlgren.org
Writers Influenced By Algren
Clips of Barry Gifford and Willem Dafoe reading from Algren's work

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1935	Somebody in Boots. The first of the writer's published works concerning the misadventures of a youthful hobo in Texas draws on Algren's own experiences, including run-ins with the law, and introduces his characteristic social protest themes through gritty realism involving the dispossessed. Born in Detroit, Algren grew up in the slums of Chicago's west side, a locale for many of his novels and stories.
1942	Never Come Morning. Algren documents crime and poverty on Chicago's West Side in the story of aspiring boxer Bruno Bicek. The novel solidifies Algren's reputation as a "Chicago novelist" and an exponent of the style known as native American realism.
1947	The Neon Wilderness. Called by scholar Chester E. Eisinger "the poet of the jail and the whorehouse," Algren looks at the seamy side of Chicago in this story collection.
1949	The Man with the Golden Arm. Winner of the first National Book Award, Algren's gritty novel, set in Chicago's Polish community, concerns card dealer and morphine addict Frankie Machine. A bestseller despite its strong theme, the novel is the first serious treatment of drug addiction in American literature and would be turned into a successful 1955 film directed by Otto Preminger and starring Frank Sinatra.
1951	Chicago: City on the Make. Algren takes the reader on an impressionistic verbal tour of Chicago's backstreets. The work is largely ignored in 1951, but ten years later Jean-Paul Sartre's translation would become a European bestseller, leading to its being reissued in the United States in 1962.
1956	A Walk on the Wild Side. Algren rewrites his autobiographical novel, Somebody in Boots (1935), about a poor white youth from Texas who gets involved with prostitutes, pimps, and derelicts in the French Quarter of New Orleans. The book is viewed as part of an underground movement against the conformity and regimentation of the era.