Nelson Algren

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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

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

Contents

[edit] Early life

Born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham in Detroit, Michigan, Algren moved to Chicago, Illinois, with his parents at the age of three to live 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 the Albany Park neighborhood on the north side, living in an apartment at 4834 N. Troy Street while his 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.

[edit] 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.

He 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". 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]

Nelson was also honored in 1998 with a fountain dedicated in his name located in Chicago's Polish Triangle In 1994 the book Nonconformity was published. It presented Algren's side of the debacle that was the 1956 film adaptation of The Man With the Golden Arm. Nonconformity also expresses the belief system behind Algren's writing, not to mention a call to writers everywhere to investigate the dark and represent the ignored.

[edit] 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.

[edit] FBI surveillance

According to Herbert Mitgang, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation did not like Algren's political views and kept a dossier on him amounting to more than 500 pages, but identified nothing concretely subversive.[3]

[edit] Chicago Controversy

The prominent display of Chicago's Polish American underclass in Algren's novels was taken by many of the city's legendarily large Polish population as Anti-Polonism.[4] The book Never Come Morning was banned for decades from the Chicago Public Library system over the massive outcry.[citation needed]

There have been two incidents regarding commemorating Algren that have erupted into controversy.

The first involved Algren's last Chicago residence, 1958 West Evergreen Street. A walk-up apartment just east of Damen Avenue in the former Polish Downtown neighborhood of West Town, an area that had been dominated by Polish immigrants and was once one of Chicago's toughest and most crowded neighborhoods. Shortly after his death, Evergreen Street was renamed Algren Street. The change caused controversy and was almost immediately changed back.[5] The area is now a gentrified, popular nightlife district.

The second involved renaming the Polish Triangle in what had been the center of the Polish Downtown after Algren. In the end a compromise was reached where the Triangle kept its name and a newly installed fountain was named after Algren and inscribed with a quote from Chicago: City on the Make circling the fountain's base: "For the masses who do the city's labor also keep the city's heart."[6]

[edit] 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 our of Chicago...."

In the 1957 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".

The liner notes of The Tubes' 1976 album Young and Rich credit the novel as the inspiration for their song "Pimp."

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 Erik Funk 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 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.

The Chicago-based band Sundowner quotes Algren in the liner notes of the album Four One Five Two (2007).

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] References

  1. ^ Hill, Lee - A Grand Guy: The Life and Art of Terry Southern (Bloomsbury, 2001), pp.63-64
  2. ^ Nelson Algren Biography, Nelson Algren Biography. November 20, 2006.
  3. ^ Mitgang, Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest Authors, NY: Donald I. Fine, Inc. 1988.
  4. ^ Reader Archive-Extract: 1998/981120/ALGREN
  5. ^ Lévy, Bernard-Henri. In the Footsteps of Tocqueville, The Atlantic Monthly, May 2005
  6. ^ Reader Archive-Extract: 1998/981120/ALGREN

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: