Nelson Algren
(March 28, 1909 – May 9, 1981) was an American writer.
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ALGREN TICKETS
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Early life
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, while 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.
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.
The protagonist talks about "how forty wheels rolled over his legs and how he was ready to strap up and give death a wrestle".
Shay wrote that Algren later commented that this poem was probably key to everything he had ever written.
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.
[1]
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.
[2]
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
[3] 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.
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 a torrid 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.
[4]
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 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
.
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.
[ 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.][ 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.][
]
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.[ 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".][
]
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 . 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
- 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.
- Mitgang, Herbert, ''Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest Authors'', NY: Donald I. Fine, Inc. 1988
- Shay, Art. ''Nelson Algren's Chicago'', University of Illinois Press 1988, p. 118
- Shay, p. 119
- Jeff Huebner, "Full Nelson", ''Chicago Reader'', November 20, 1998
- Lévy, Bernard-Henri. In the Footsteps of Tocqueville, ''The Atlantic Monthly'', May 2005