Algren, Nelson

ALGREN, NELSON (1909–1981). Novelist and essayist of Swedish and German-Jewish ancestry, Algren was born in Detroit, but when he was three his family moved to Chicago, where he remained most of his life. Although he received a degree in journalism (University of Illinois, 1931), the Great Depression forced him to take odd jobs such as door-to-door salesman, migratory worker, carnival hand, and gas-station attendant. His first published story, “So Help Me,” appeared in Story in 1933. His first novel, Somebody in Boots, was published in 1935 and Never Come Morning seven years later.

Most of Algren’s fiction is about the despised and desperate subproletariat: “life’s other side—men and women who have no alternatives … whose lives are nightmares,” “backwoodsmen without a backwoods,” “hitchhikers alone on the nowhere road,” outcasts for whom “everything is hopelessly and forever wrong.” His intense realism, sense of foreboding, pessimism, and dark humor always distinguished Algren from the sentimental socialist authors of his generation.

In the 1930s Algren helped Jack Conroy on the Anvil and worked on the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Writers’ Project, helping to complete the Galena Guide and writing scripts for a WPA radio series on working-class life. He was close to the Communist Party for some years, but he never became a member, finding in it “a certain kind of rigidity” and an “authoritarian attitude” that repelled him. While his own radicalism did not tend to organizational life, he frequently praised figures such as Eugene Debs and Haymarket martyr Louis Lingg. Algren remained devoted to revolutionary ideals long after more orthodox “reds” of the 1930s had accommodated themselves to the postwar conservative backlash.

Algren warmly supported the civil rights movement as “the only movement that sustains the old American radical tradition,” and he was an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam. In the early 1960s, when an interviewer asked him to agree that the United States was “more of an open society than Russia,” he retorted, “It’s as though I were in a flood in Mississippi and the water is up to my waist and you’re saying, ‘It really isn’t serious, because there are people drowning in the Volga.’ “ In his later years he acknowledged anarchist leanings, and remarked, “I would like to think I am basically against government.”

The Man with the Golden Arm (1949) and A Walk on the Wild Side (1956) brought him a mass audience and movie sales. His stories were collected in The Neon Wilderness (1949) and, together with several essays and a few poems, in The Last Carousel (1973). Less well known than his fiction are Algren’s essays, which are among his finest work and embody some of his most provocative criticism of American society. This category includes the merciless Chicago: City on the Make (1951), parts of Who Lost an American? (1963), the savagely ironic “The Cortez Gang,” his somber reflections on the 1919 “Black Sox” scandal, and the posthumously published book-length essay Nonconformity.

As the 1960s wore on, Algren stated he did not know of any culture that was as hard on its writers as America. His own experiences with publishers and film producers had not been pleasant. Implacably hostile to the literary establishment, he found himself ostracized by major publishers and book reviewers.

In 1975 Algren relocated to New Jersey and then to New York. He was researching the life of black middleweight boxer and political prisoner Rubin (“Hurricane”) Carter for what would be his last novel, The Devil’s Stocking. Rejected by mainstream publishers, the novel remained unpublished at the time of Algren’s death and only appeared two years later under the imprint of a minor firm. Of this last book Algren said, “I’ve tried to write about a man’s struggle against injustice—that’s the only story worth telling.”

Asher, Colin, Never a Lovely So Real: the Life and Work of Nelson Algren. New York: W.W. Norton, 2019.

Donohue, H. F,. Conversations with Nelson Algren. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964.

Drew, Bettina. Nelson Algren. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989.

The Nelson Algren Collection: Guide and Inventory. Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. The Ohio State University. https://library.osu.edu/finding-aids/rarebooks/cms60.php/