Nelson Algren
Encyclopedia
Nelson Algren was an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 writer.

Early life

Algren was born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham in Detroit, Michigan
Detroit, Michigan
Detroit is the major city among the primary cultural, financial, and transportation centers in the Metro Detroit area, a region of 5.2 million people. As the seat of Wayne County, the city of Detroit is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan and serves as a major port on the Detroit River...

, the son of Goldie (née Kalisher) and Gerson Abraham. 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
Swedes
Swedes are a Scandinavian nation and ethnic group native to Sweden, mostly inhabiting Sweden and the other Nordic countries, with descendants living in a number of countries.-Etymology:...

 convert to Judaism
Judaism
Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...

, 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
Albany Park, Chicago
Albany Park is one of 77 well-defined Chicago, Illinois, community areas on the Northwest Side of the City of Chicago. It includes the Albany Park neighborhood, one of the most ethnically diverse in the United States...

. His father worked as an auto mechanic nearby on North Kedzie Avenue.

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
Chicago White Sox
The Chicago White Sox are a Major League Baseball team located in Chicago, Illinois.The White Sox play in the American League's Central Division. Since , the White Sox have played in U.S. Cellular Field, which was originally called New Comiskey Park and nicknamed The Cell by local fans...

, while they were fans of the North Side Chicago Cubs
Chicago Cubs
The Chicago Cubs are a professional baseball team located in Chicago, Illinois. They are members of the Central Division of Major League Baseball's National League. They are one of two Major League clubs based in Chicago . The Cubs are also one of the two remaining charter members of the National...

. They discovered his allegiances when he revealed his favorite player to be White Sox shortstop Swede Risberg
Swede Risberg
Charles August "Swede" Risberg was an Major League Baseball shortstop. He played for the Chicago White Sox from 1917 to 1920. He is best known for his involvement in the 1919 Black Sox scandal.-Background:...

. This teasing only increased when Risberg and other White Sox players were implicated in the 1920 Black Sox Scandal
Black Sox Scandal
The Black Sox Scandal took place around and during the play of the American baseball 1919 World Series. Eight members of the Chicago White Sox were banned for life from baseball for intentionally losing games, which allowed the Cincinnati Reds to win the World Series...

. Despite going on to spend most of his life on the North Side, Algren remained a White Sox fan into his later years.

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
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...

, graduating with a Bachelor of Science
Bachelor of Science
A Bachelor of Science is an undergraduate academic degree awarded for completed courses that generally last three to five years .-Australia:In Australia, the BSc is a 3 year degree, offered from 1st year on...

 in journalism
Journalism
Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience in a timely fashion. Though there are many variations of journalism, the ideal is to inform the intended audience. Along with covering organizations and institutions such as government and...

 during the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...

 in 1931.

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
Somebody in Boots
Somebody in Boots is writer Nelson Algren's first novel, based on his personal experiences of living in Texas during the Great Depression. The novel was published by Vanguard Press in 1935. The title refers to someone with material well-being and authority, as poor folk and the powerless wore shoes...

, 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
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...

, 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 of Chicago's large Polish-American community, some of whose members denounced it as pro-Axis
Axis Powers
The Axis powers , also known as the Axis alliance, Axis nations, Axis countries, or just the Axis, was an alignment of great powers during the mid-20th century that fought World War II against the Allies. It began in 1936 with treaties of friendship between Germany and Italy and between Germany and...

 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
Chicago Public Library
The Chicago Public Library is the public library system that serves the City of Chicago in Illinois. It consists of 79 branches, including a central library, two regional libraries, and branches distributed throughout the city....

.

Golden Years
Algren is probably best known for his 1949 novel The Man With the Golden Arm
The Man with the Golden Arm (novel)
The Man with the Golden Arm is a novel by Nelson Algren that details the trials and hardships of illicit card dealer "Frankie Machine", along with an assortment of colorful characters, on Chicago's Near Northwest Side. A veteran of World War II, Frankie struggles to stabilize his personal life...

, which won the first National Book Award
National Book Award
The National Book Awards are a set of American literary awards. Started in 1950, the Awards are presented annually to American authors for literature published in the current year. In 1989 the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization which now oversees and manages the National Book...

 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
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

 and married to a wife who he erroneously he believes he crippled in a car accident.

His next book, Chicago, City on the Make
Chicago, City on the Make
Chicago: City on the Make is an essay by Nelson Algren published in 1951. Initially greeted with scorn by critics and newspaper editors in the city of its gaze , it is now widely regarded by scholars as the definitive prose portrait of the city of Chicago, although it has never rivaled the literary...

(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
The Man with the Golden Arm
The Man with the Golden Arm is a 1955 American drama film, based on the novel of the same name by Nelson Algren, which tells the story of a heroin addict who gets clean while in prison, but struggles to stay that way in the outside world. It stars Frank Sinatra, Eleanor Parker, Kim Novak, Arnold...

 starring Frank Sinatra
Frank Sinatra
Francis Albert "Frank" Sinatra was an American singer and actor.Beginning his musical career in the swing era with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, Sinatra became an unprecedentedly successful solo artist in the early to mid-1940s, after being signed to Columbia Records in 1943. Being the idol of the...

 directed by Otto Preminger
Otto Preminger
Otto Ludwig Preminger was an Austro–Hungarian-American theatre and film director.After moving from the theatre to Hollywood, he directed over 35 feature films in a five-decade career. He rose to prominence for stylish film noir mysteries such as Laura and Fallen Angel...

, 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
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...

 was adapted into the 1962 movie Walk on the Wild Side
Walk on the Wild Side (film)
Walk on the Wild Side is a 1962 film directed by Edward Dmytryk, adapted from the 1956 novel A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren. The film had a star-studded cast, including Laurence Harvey, Capucine, Jane Fonda , Anne Baxter, and Barbara Stanwyck, and was scripted by John Fante. Nonetheless,...

, 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
Art Shay
Art Shay is an American photographer and writer. Born in 1922, he grew up in the Bronx and then served as a navigator in the U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II, during which he flew 52 bomber missions . Shay joined the staff of Life magazine, and quickly became a Chicago-based freelance...

 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.

Influence

In the fall of 1955, Algren was interviewed for the Paris Review
Paris Review
The Paris Review is a literary quarterly founded in 1953 by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton. Plimpton edited the Review from its founding until his death in 2003. In its first five years, The Paris Review published works by Jack Kerouac, Philip Larkin, V. S...

by rising author Terry Southern
Terry Southern
Terry Southern was an American author, essayist, screenwriter and university lecturer, noted for his distinctive satirical style...

. 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.

Hurricane Carter & Patterson, 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
Paterson, New Jersey
Paterson is a city serving as the county seat of Passaic County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States Census, its population was 146,199, rendering it New Jersey's third largest city and one of the largest cities in the New York City Metropolitan Area, despite a decrease of 3,023...

. 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.

Posthumous Works
The article about Carter had grown into a novel, The Devil's Stocking, which was published posthumously in 1983.

In 1994 the book Nonconformity
Nonconformity
Nonconformity may refer to:* Nonconformity , a memoir by Nelson Algren, published posthumously in 1992* Nonconformity , a term in quality management* A type of unconformity in geology...

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
Seven Stories Press
Seven Stories Press is an independent publishing company. Located in New York City, the company was founded by editor Dan Simon in 1995 after he parted company with Four Walls Eight Windows. The company was named for its seven founding authors: Annie Ernaux, Gary Null, the estate of Nelson Algren,...

.

WWII Military Service & Vietnam

Algren served as a private in the European Theater of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

 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
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...

.

Ironically, according to Drew's biography, Algren angled for a journalism job in South Vietnam
South Vietnam
South Vietnam was a state which governed southern Vietnam until 1975. It received international recognition in 1950 as the "State of Vietnam" and later as the "Republic of Vietnam" . Its capital was Saigon...

. 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 & Questions About Sexuality

In 1967, he wrote an outraged review of James Purdy
James Purdy
James Otis Purdy was a controversial American novelist, short story-writer, poet, and playwright who, since his debut in 1956, published over a dozen novels, and many collections of poetry, short stories, and plays. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages. He has been praised by...

'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.

Death & 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
Long Island
Long Island is an island located in the southeast part of the U.S. state of New York, just east of Manhattan. Stretching northeast into the Atlantic Ocean, Long Island contains four counties, two of which are boroughs of New York City , and two of which are mainly suburban...

. 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
O. Henry Award
The O. Henry Award is the only yearly award given to short stories of exceptional merit. The award is named after the American master of the form, O. Henry....

 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
Southern Review
The Southern Review, a literary journal co-founded in 1935 by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks and located on the campus of Louisiana State University, publishes fiction, poetry, critical essays, interviews, book reviews, and excerpts from novels in progress by established and emerging writers...

) and "The Captain is Impaled" (Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine is a monthly magazine of literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts, with a generally left-wing perspective. It is the second-oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the U.S. . The current editor is Ellen Rosenbush, who replaced Roger Hodge in January 2010...

) were O. Henry Award winners in 1941 and 1950, respectively.
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 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
Division Street (Chicago)
Division Street is a major east-west street in Chicago, Illinois, located at 1200 North . Division Street begins in the Gold Coast neighborhood near Lake Shore Drive, passes through Polonia Triangle at Milwaukee Avenue into Wicker Park and continues to Chicago's city limits and into the city's...

, Algren's favorite street as well as the onetime Polish Broadway runs right past it.

Personal life

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
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, often shortened to Simone de Beauvoir , was a French existentialist philosopher, public intellectual, and social theorist. She wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography in several volumes, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and...

 and they traveled to Latin America
Latin America
Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages  – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...

 together in 1949. In her novel The Mandarins
The Mandarins
The Mandarins is a 1954 roman-à-clef by Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir was awarded the Prix Goncourt prize in 1954 for The Mandarins. It was first published in English in 1957....

(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.


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
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...

 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
University of Iowa
The University of Iowa is a public state-supported research university located in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. It is the oldest public university in the state. The university is organized into eleven colleges granting undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees...

's Writers Workshop
Writers Workshop
Writers Workshop is a Calcutta-based literary publisher founded by the poet-professor P. Lal in 1958. Over the next few decades it published many new authors in urban literature of the post-independence period. These authors later became big names.-History:...

. They married that year and divorced in 1967. According to Kurt Vonnegut, who taught with him at Iowa in '65, Algren's "enthusiasm for writng, reading and gambling left little time for the duties of a married man."

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
Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of...

, John Peter Altgeld
John Peter Altgeld
John Peter Altgeld was the 20th Governor of the U.S. state of Illinois from 1893 until 1897. He was the first Democratic governor of that state since the 1850s...

, Clarence Darrow
Clarence Darrow
Clarence Seward Darrow was an American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union, best known for defending teenage thrill killers Leopold and Loeb in their trial for murdering 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks and defending John T...

 and Eugene V. Debs
Eugene V. Debs
Eugene Victor Debs was an American union leader, one of the founding members of the International Labor Union and the Industrial Workers of the World , and several times the candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States...

. Algren references all of these men—as well as Big Bill Haywood
Bill Haywood
William Dudley Haywood , better known as "Big Bill" Haywood, was a founding member and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World , and a member of the Executive Committee of the Socialist Party of America...

, the Haymarket defendants
Haymarket affair
The Haymarket affair was a demonstration and unrest that took place on Tuesday May 4, 1886, at the Haymarket Square in Chicago. It began as a rally in support of striking workers. An unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at police as they dispersed the public meeting...

 and the Memorial Day Massacre victims
Memorial Day massacre of 1937
In the Memorial Day massacre of 1937, the Chicago Police Department shot and killed ten unarmed demonstrators in Chicago, on May 30, 1937. The incident took place during the "Little Steel Strike" in the United States....

--in Chicago: City on the Make.

Despite its appeal to artists and intellectuals during the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...

, Algren told McCarrell that he never joined the Communist Party
Communist Party USA
The Communist Party USA is a Marxist political party in the United States, established in 1919. It has a long, complex history that is closely related to the histories of similar communist parties worldwide and the U.S. labor movement....

. Among other reasons, he cited negative experiences both he and Richard Wright
Richard Wright
Richard Wright may refer to:* Richard Wright , African-American novelist, writer, poet, essayist* Richard Wright , also known as Rick Wright, English musician, founding member of Pink Floyd...

 had with party members. However, his involvement in groups deemed "subversive" during the McCarthy
McCarthyism
McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. The term has its origins in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s and characterized by...

 years drew the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
Federal Bureau of Investigation
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency . The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime...

 (FBI). Among his affiliations, he was a participant in the John Reed Club
John Reed Club
The John Reed Club was an American, semi-national, Marxist club for writers, artists, and intellectuals, named after the American journalist, activist, and poet, John Reed.-Founding:...

 in the 1930s and later an honorary co-chair of the "Save Ethel and Julius Rosenberg
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg and Julius Rosenberg were American communists who were convicted and executed in 1953 for conspiracy to commit espionage during a time of war. The charges related to their passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union...

 Committee" in Chicago. According to Herbert Mitgang
Herbert Mitgang
Herbert Mitgang is an author, editor, journalist, playwright, and producer of television news documentaries.- Work :During World War II Mitgang served as an army correspondent and became the managing editor of the...

, the FBI suspected Algren's political views and kept a dossier on him amounting to more than 500 pages but identified nothing concretely subversive.

During the 1950s, Algren wished to travel to Paris with his romantic companion, Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, often shortened to Simone de Beauvoir , was a French existentialist philosopher, public intellectual, and social theorist. She wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography in several volumes, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and...

, but due to government surveillance his passport applications were denied. 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."

Algren and Chicago Polonia

Algren described Ashland Avenue as figuratively connecting Chicago to Warsaw
Warsaw
Warsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It is located on the Vistula River, roughly from the Baltic Sea and from the Carpathian Mountains. Its population in 2010 was estimated at 1,716,855 residents with a greater metropolitan area of 2,631,902 residents, making Warsaw the 10th most...

 in Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...

. His own life involved the Polish community of Chicago
Poles in Chicago
Chicago Polonia, refers to both immigrant Poles and Americans of Polish heritage living in Chicago, Illinois. They are a part of worldwide Polonia, the proper term for the Polish Diaspora outside of Poland. Poles in Chicago have contributed to the economic, social and cultural well-being of Chicago...

 in many ways, including his second wife Amanda Kontowicz. His friend Art Shay
Art Shay
Art Shay is an American photographer and writer. Born in 1922, he grew up in the Bronx and then served as a navigator in the U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II, during which he flew 52 bomber missions . Shay joined the staff of Life magazine, and quickly became a Chicago-based freelance...

 wrote about Algren, who while gambling, listened to old Polish love songs sung by an elderly waitress. The city's Polish Downtown
Polish Downtown (Chicago)
Polish Downtown was Chicago’s oldest and most prominent Polish settlement. Polish Downtown was the political, cultural and social capital of not only Poles in Chicago but Polish Americans throughout North America as well...

, 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
Milwaukee Avenue (Chicago)
Milwaukee Avenue is a major diagonal street in the city of Chicago and the northern suburbs. True to its name, it once led to the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Starting with a short section at N. Canal and W. Lake Streets, it begins in earnest at the corner of N Desplaines and W. Kinzie Streets...

, 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
Invasion of Poland (1939)
The Invasion of Poland, also known as the September Campaign or 1939 Defensive War in Poland and the Poland Campaign in Germany, was an invasion of Poland by Germany, the Soviet Union, and a small Slovak contingent that marked the start of World War II in Europe...

 by Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...

 and the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

, a period when Poles, like Jews, were labeled an inferior race by Nazi ideology
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...

. 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
Polish Roman Catholic Union of America
The Polish Roman Catholic Union of America is the oldest Polish American organization in the United States. Its history spans notable periods in the development of the Polish American ethnic group, from the time of early settlement by immigrants from Poland through their development of ethnic...

, and other Polish-American institutions. Articles appeared in the local Polish newspapers and letters were sent to Mayor Ed Kelly
Edward Joseph Kelly
Edward Joseph Kelly served as chief engineer of the Chicago sanitary district in the 1920s, and later as mayor of Chicago, Illinois for the Democratic Party....

, the Chicago Public Library
Chicago Public Library
The Chicago Public Library is the public library system that serves the City of Chicago in Illinois. It consists of 79 branches, including a central library, two regional libraries, and branches distributed throughout the city....

, and Algren's publisher, Harper & Brothers
Harper & Brothers
Harper is an American publishing house, the flagship imprint of global publisher HarperCollins.-History:James Harper and his brother John, printers by training, started their book publishing business J. & J. Harper in 1817. Their two brothers, Joseph Wesley Harper and Fletcher Harper, joined them...

. 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
Chicago Public Library
The Chicago Public Library is the public library system that serves the City of Chicago in Illinois. It consists of 79 branches, including a central library, two regional libraries, and branches distributed throughout the city....

 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 noted by Chicago journalist Mike Royko
Mike Royko
Michael "Mike" Royko was a newspaper columnist in Chicago, who won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for commentary...

. The walk-up apartment just east of Damen Avenue in the former Polish Downtown
Polish Downtown (Chicago)
Polish Downtown was Chicago’s oldest and most prominent Polish settlement. Polish Downtown was the political, cultural and social capital of not only Poles in Chicago but Polish Americans throughout North America as well...

 neighborhood of West Town
West Town
-United Kingdom:*West Town, Peterborough in Cambridgeshire*West Town, Hampshire on Hayling Island*West Town, Backwell in North Somerset-United States:*West Town, Chicago in Illinois*West Town Mall in Knoxville, Tennessee*West Towne Mall in Madison, Wisconsin...

 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.

In 1998, Algren enthusiasts instigated the renaming after Algren of the Polish Triangle
Polonia Triangle
Polonia Triangle , also known as the Polish Triangle, is located in West Town, in what had been the historical Polish Downtown area of Chicago. It is bound by Division, Ashland and Milwaukee Avenue. A single-tiered fountain made of black iron with a bowl about nine feet in diameter is installed...

 in what had been the center of the Polish Downtown. Replacing the plaza's traditional name, the director of the Polish Museum of America
Polish Museum of America
The Polish Museum of America is located in West Town, in what had been the historical Polish Downtown neighborhood of Chicago. It is home to a plethora of Polish artifacts, artwork, and embroidered folk costumes among its growing collection...

 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".

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 interrupted the regular broadcast through the Hannington transmitter of the Independent Broadcasting Authority in England for six minutes on 26 November 1977. Issue No. 24 of Fortean Times
Fortean Times
Fortean Times is a British monthly magazine devoted to the anomalous phenomena popularised by Charles Fort. Previously published by John Brown Publishing and then I Feel Good Publishing , it is now published by Dennis Publishing Ltd. As of December 2010, its circulation was approximately 18,000...

(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
Esquire (magazine)
Esquire is a men's magazine, published in the U.S. by the Hearst Corporation. Founded in 1932, it flourished during the Great Depression under the guidance of founder and editor Arnold Gingrich.-History:...

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!"

Nelson Algren Award

Each year the Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune
The Chicago Tribune is a major daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, and the flagship publication of the Tribune Company. Formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" , it remains the most read daily newspaper of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region and is...

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
Studs Terkel
Louis "Studs" Terkel was an American author, historian, actor, and broadcaster. He received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1985 for The Good War, and is best remembered for his oral histories of common Americans, and for hosting a long-running radio show in Chicago.-Early...

, 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 Vonengut about being cheated out of the profits of The Man With the Golden Arm film)

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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