American writer (1909–1981)
Nelson Algren (born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham; March 28, 1909 – May 9, 1981) was an American writer. His 1949 novel The Man with the Golden Arm won say publicly National Book Award[2] and was adapted as the 1955 lp of the same name.
Algren articulated the world of "drunks, pimps, prostitutes, freaks, drug addicts, prize fighters, corrupt politicians, esoteric hoodlums".[citation needed]Art Shay singled out a poem Algren wrote cheat the perspective of a "halfy," street slang for a legless man on wheels.[3] Shay said that Algren considered this lyric to be a key to everything he had ever written.[3] The protagonist talks about "how forty wheels rolled over his legs and how he was ready to strap up gain give death a wrestle."[3]
According to Harold Augenbraum, "in the customary 1940s and early 1950s he was one of the properly known literary writers in America."[4] The lover of French litt‚rateur Simone de Beauvoir,[4] he is featured in her novel The Mandarins,[4] set in Paris and Chicago. He was called "a sort of bard of the down-and-outer"[4] based on this retain, but also on his short stories in The Neon Wilderness (1947) and his novel A Walk on the Wild Side (1956). The latter was adapted as the 1962 film donation the same name (directed by Edward Dmytryk, screenplay by Bathroom Fante).
Algren was born in Detroit, Michigan, the son attain Goldie (née Kalisher) and Gerson Abraham.[5] At the age make out three, he moved with his parents to Chicago, Illinois, where they lived in a working-class, immigrant neighborhood on the Southeast Side. His father was the son of a Swedish transform to Judaism and of a German Jewish woman, and his mother was of German Jewish descent. (She owned a bonbons store on the South Side.) When he was young, Algren's family lived at 7139 S. South Park Avenue (now S. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive) in the Greater Grand Crossover section of the South Side.[6]
When he was eight, his cover moved from the far South Side to an apartment assume 4834 N. Troy Street, in the North Side neighborhood close the eyes to Albany Park. His father worked as an auto mechanic within easy reach on North Kedzie Avenue.[6][7]
In his essay Chicago: City on description Make, Algren added autobiographical details: he recalled being teased be oblivious to neighborhood children after moving to Troy Street because he was a fan of the South Side White Sox. Despite extant most of his life on the North Side, Algren conditions changed his affiliation and remained a White Sox fan.[8]
Algren was educated in Chicago's public schools, graduated from Hibbard High Primary (now Roosevelt High School) and went on to study filter the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, graduating with a Man of Science in journalism during the Great Depression in 1931.[6] During his time at the University of Illinois, he wrote for the Daily Illini student newspaper.[9]
Algren wrote his first story, "So Help Me", in 1933, while take steps was in Texas working at a gas station. Before reverting to Chicago, he was caught stealing a typewriter from have in mind empty classroom at Sul Ross State University in Alpine. Pacify boarded a train for his getaway but was apprehended spell returned to Alpine. He was held in jail for all but five months and faced a possible additional three years bind prison. He was released, but the incident made a abyssal impression on him. It deepened his identification with outsiders, has-beens, and the general failures who later populated his fictional universe.
In 1935 Algren won the first of his three O. Henry Awards for his short story, "The Brother's House." Interpretation story was first published in Story magazine and was reprinted in an anthology of O. Henry Award winners.
His leading novel, Somebody in Boots (1935), was later dismissed by Author as primitive and politically naive, claiming he infused it convene Marxist ideas he little understood, because they were fashionable destiny the time. The book was unsuccessful and went out fail print.
Algren married Amanda Kontowicz in 1937. He had tumble her at a party celebrating the publication of Somebody lessening Boots. They eventually would divorce and remarry before divorcing a second and final time.
His second novel, Never Come Morning (1942), was described by Andrew O'Hagan in 2019 as "the book that really shows the Algren style in its rule great flourishing." It portrays the dead-end life of a foreordained young Polish-American boxer turned criminal.[10]Ernest Hemingway, in a July 8, 1942, letter to his publisher Maxwell Perkins, said of say publicly novel: "I think it very, very good. It is variety fine and good stuff to come out of Chicago." Depiction novel offended members of Chicago's large Polish-American community, some spend whose members denounced it as pro-Axis propaganda. Not knowing think about it Algren was of partly Jewish descent, some incensed Polish-American Chicagoans said he was pro-Nazi Nordic. His Polish-American critics persuaded Politician Edward Joseph Kelly to ban the novel from the Metropolis Public Library.
Algren served as a private in depiction European Theater of World War II as a litter traveler. Despite being a college graduate, he was denied entry encouragement Officer Candidate School. There is conjecture that it may maintain been due to suspicion regarding his political beliefs, but 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 sadness to serve in the war but was drafted in 1943. An indifferent soldier, he dealt on the black market even as he was stationed in France. He received a bad fight by some fellow black marketeers.
Algren's first short-story collection, The Neon Wilderness (1947), collected 24 stories from 1933 to 1947. The same year, Algren received an award from the Land Academy of Arts and Letters and a grant from Chicago's Newberry Library.[11]
It was in that same year that Algren esoteric an affair with Simone de Beauvoir. Mary Guggenheim, who difficult to understand been Algren's lover, recommended De Beauvoir visit Algren in Metropolis. The couple would summer together in Algren's cottage in rendering lake front community of Miller Beach, Indiana, and also perform to Latin America together in 1949. In her novel The Mandarins (1954), Beauvoir wrote of Algren (who is 'Lewis Brogan' in the book):
At first I found it amusing coronet in the flesh that classic American species: self-made leftist essayist. Now, I began taking an interest in Brogan. Through his stories, you got the feeling that he claimed no straighttalking to life and that nevertheless he had always had a passionate desire to live. I liked that mixture of propriety and eagerness.
Algren and Beauvoir eventually became disenchanted with each molest, and a bitter Algren wrote of Beauvoir and Sartre bond a Playboy magazine article about a trip he took justify North Africa with Beauvoir, that she and Sartre were make longer users of others than a prostitute and her pimp farm animals their way.[12]
Algren's next novel, The Man with the Golden Arm (1949), would become his best known work. It won interpretation National Book Award for Fiction in 1950.[2] The protagonist work at the book, Frankie Machine, is an aspiring drummer who deterioration a dealer in illicit card games. Frankie is trapped squeeze up demimonde Chicago, having picked up a morphine habit during his brief military service during World War II. He is wed to a woman whom he mistakenly believes became crippled have as a feature a car accident he caused.
Algren's next book, Chicago: Penetrate on the Make (1951), was a scathing essay that indignant the city's boosters but portrayed the back alleys of say publicly city, its dispossessed, its corrupt politicians and its swindlers. Author also declared his love of the City as a "lovely so real".
The Man With the Golden Arm was modified as a 1955 movie of the same name, starring Uncovered Sinatra and directed and produced by Otto Preminger. Algren presently withdrew from direct involvement. It was a commercial success but Algren loathed the film.[10] He sued Preminger seeking an restraint to stop him from claiming ownership of the property variety "An Otto Preminger film", but he soon withdrew his adjust for financial reasons.[13]
In the fall of 1955, Algren was interviewed for The Paris Review by rising author Terry Southern. Writer and Southern became friends through this meeting and remained put over touch for many years. Algren became one of Southern's leading enthusiastic early supporters and, when he taught creative writing wealthy later years, he often used Southern as an example firm a great short story writer.[14]
Algren had another commercial success be smitten by the novel A Walk on the Wild Side (1956). Closure reworked some of the material from his first novel, Somebody in Boots, as well as picking up elements from a handful published short stories, such as his 1947 "The Face range the Barroom Floor".[citation needed] The novel was about a peregrination Texan adrift during the early years of the Great Kaput. He said it was superior to the earlier book. Icon was adapted as the 1962 movie of the same name. Some critics thought the film bowdlerized the book, and conduct was not commercially successful.
A Walk decide the Wild Side was Algren's last commercial success. He inverted to teaching creative writing at the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop to supplement his income.
In 1965, he met Betty Ann Jones while teaching at the Writers Workshop. They wedded that year and divorced in 1967.[15] According to Kurt Writer, who taught with him at Iowa in 1965, Algren's "enthusiasm for writing, reading and gambling left little time for representation duties of a married man."[16]
Algren played a small part encompass Philip Kaufman's underground comedy Fearless Frank (1967) as a criminal named Needles.
In 1968, he signed the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments admire protest against the Vietnam War.[17]
According to Bettina Drew's biography, Writer angled for a journalism job in South Vietnam. Strapped undertake cash more than a decade after his only two commercially successful novels, he saw Vietnam as an opportunity to bring into being money, not from journalism fees but dealing on the swarthy market.
In 1975, Algren was commissioned to write a magazine article about the trial constantly Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, the prize fighter who had been perform guilty of double murder. While researching the article, Algren visited Carter's hometown of Paterson, New Jersey. Algren was instantly enchanted by the city of Paterson and he immediately decided denote move there. In the summer of 1975, Algren sold cleft most of his belongings, left Chicago, and moved into rest apartment in Paterson.[18]
In 1980, Algren moved to a house comport yourself Sag Harbor, Long Island. He died of a heart search at home on May 9, 1981. He is buried entice Oakland Cemetery, Sag Harbor, Long Island.[19]
After Algren thriving, it was discovered that the article about Hurricane Carter esoteric grown into a novel, The Devil's Stocking, which was promulgated posthumously in 1983.[15]
In September 1996, the book Nonconformity was publicised by Seven Stories Press, presenting Algren's view of the difficulties surrounding the 1956 film adaptation of The Man With representation Golden Arm. Nonconformity also presents the belief system behind Algren's writing and a call to writers everywhere to investigate depiction dark and represent the ignored. The Neon Wilderness and The Last Carousel were also reprinted by Seven Stories Press obtain recognized as the Library Journal Editors' Best Reprints of 1997.
In 2009, Seven Stories then published Entrapment and Other Writings, a major collection of previously unpublished writings that included deuce early short stories, "Forgive Them, Lord," and "The Lightless Room," and the long unfinished novel fragment referenced in the book's title. In 2019, Blackstone Audio released the complete library possession Algren's books as audiobooks. And in 2020 Olive Films on the rampage Nelson Algren Live, a performance film of Algren's life extremity work starring Willem Dafoe and Barry Gifford, among others, produced by the Seven Stories Institute.[citation needed][20]
Algren's friend Stuart McCarrell described him as a "gut radical," who generally sided with the downtrodden but was uninterested in philosophic debates and politically inactive for most of his life. McCarrell states that Algren's heroes were the "prairie radicals" Theodore Author, John Peter Altgeld, Clarence Darrow and Eugene V. Debs.[21] Writer references all of these men – as well as Huge Bill Haywood, the Haymarket defendants and the Memorial Day Annihilation victims – in Chicago: City on the Make.
Algren avid McCarrell that he never joined the Communist Party, despite tog up appeal to artists and intellectuals during the Great Depression. Amongst other reasons, he cited negative experiences both he and Richard Wright had with party members.[21] However, his involvement in aggregations deemed "subversive" during the McCarthy years drew the attention obey the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Among his affiliations, closure was a participant in the John Reed Club in interpretation 1930s and later an honorary co-chair of the "Save Ethel and Julius Rosenberg Committee" in Chicago.[22][23] According to Herbert Mitgang, the FBI suspected Algren's political views and kept a dossier on him amounting to more than 500 pages but identified nothing concretely subversive.[24]
During the 1950s, Algren wished to travel interrupt Paris with his romantic companion, Simone de Beauvoir, but oral exam to government surveillance his passport applications were denied.[23] When smartness finally did get a passport in 1960, McCarrell concludes consider it "it was too late. By then the relationship [with flit Beauvoir] had changed subtly but decisively."[21]
Algren described Ashland Avenue as figuratively connecting Chicago to Warsaw in Poland.[3] His own life involved the Polish community of Chicago hutch many ways, including his first wife Amanda Kontowicz. His crony Art Shay wrote about Algren, who while gambling, listened attend to old Polish love songs sung by an elderly waitress.[25] Description city's Polish Downtown, where he lived for years, played a significant part in his literary output. Polish bars that Author frequented in his gambling, such as the Bit of Polska on Milwaukee Avenue, figured in such writings as Never Build Morning and The Man With the Golden Arm.[3]
His novel Never Come Morning was published several years after the invasion remind you of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, a stint when Poles, like Jews, were labeled an inferior race fail to see Nazi ideology.[8] Chicago's Polish-American leaders thought Never Come Morning played on these anti-Polish stereotypes, and launched a sustained campaign surface the book through the Polish press, the Polish Roman Grand Union of America, and other Polish-American institutions. Articles appeared pressure the local Polish newspapers and letters were sent to Politician Ed Kelly, the Chicago Public Library, and Algren's publisher, Player & Brothers. The general tone of the campaign is optional by a Zgoda editorial that attacked his character and intellectual state, saw readers who got free copies as victims admire a Nazi-financed plot, and said the novel proved a abyssal desire to harm ethnic Poles on Algren's part. The Typeface American Council sent a copy of a resolution condemning picture novel to the FBI. Algren and his publisher defended accept these accusations, with the author telling a library meeting renounce the book was about the effects of poverty, regardless hook national background. The mayor had the novel removed from representation Chicago Public Library system, and it apparently remained absent assistance at least 20 years.[8] At least two later efforts stop commemorate Algren in Polish Downtown echoed the attacks on representation novels.
Shortly after his death in 1981, his last City residence at 1958 West Evergreen Street was noted by Metropolis journalist Mike Royko. The walk-up apartment just east of Damen Avenue in the former Polish Downtown neighborhood of West Municipality was in an area that had been dominated by Inflate immigrants and was once one of Chicago's toughest and heavyhanded crowded neighborhoods. The renaming of Evergreen Street to Algren Concourse caused controversy and was almost immediately reversed.[26]
In 1998, Algren enthusiasts instigated the renaming after Algren of the Polish Triangle mark out what had been the center of the Polish Downtown. Replace the plaza's traditional name, the director of the Polish Museum of America predicted, would obliterate the history of Chicago traditional Poles and insult ethnic Polish institutions and local businesses. Imprisoned the end a compromise was reached where the Triangle unbroken its older name and a newly installed fountain was christian name after Algren and inscribed with a quotation about the city's working people protecting its essence, from Algren's essay "Chicago: Seep into on the Make".[8]
A passage featured in Algren's book The Devil's Stocking (1983) was broadcast on TV some six days earlier during the Southern Television hoax in the UK which generated international publicity when students[27] interrupted the regular broadcast repeat the Hannington transmitter of the Independent Broadcasting Authority for sise minutes on November 26, 1977.[28] Issue No. 24 of Fortean Times[29] (Winter 1977) transcribed the hoaxer's message as:
This not bad the voice of Asteron. I am an authorized representative supporting the Intergalactic Mission and I have a message for depiction planet Earth. We are beginning to enter the period stand for Aquarius and there are many corrections which have to print made by Earth people. All your weapons of evil obligated to be destroyed. You have only a short time to secure to learn to live together in peace. You must material 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 fratricide, about whom Algren had written a magazine article for Esquire in 1975. In the book, as a period of restlessness within the prison begins, the character 'Kenyatta' gives a articulation closely mirroring the Fortean Times transcript of the 1977 dramatize, and those of other American newspaper reports of the arrival. The passage in Algren's book says:
I am an authoritative representative of the Intergalactic Mission," Kenyatta finally disclosed his letter of recommendatio. "I have a message for the Planet Earth. We uphold beginning to enter the period of Aquarius. Many corrections scheme to be made by Earth people. All your weapons elaborate evil must be destroyed. You have only a short adjourn to learn to live together in peace. You must be real in peace" – here he paused to gain everybody's attention – "you must live in peace or leave the galaxy!"[30]
Algren won his first O. Henry Award for his short appear "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) and "The Captain is Impaled" (Harper's Magazine) were O. Henry Award winners in 1941 and 1950, respectively.[31] None of the stories won the first, second stage third place awards but were included in the annual put in safekeeping of O. Henry Award stories.
The Man with the Yellow Arm won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1950.[2]
In 1947 Algren won an Arts and Letters Award from interpretation National Institute of Arts and Letters, the forerunner to say publicly American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1974 the Organization awarded him the Award of Merit Medal for the fresh. And three months before he died in 1981, Algren was elected to the Academy of Arts and Letters.
Algren was also honored in 1998 with the Nelson Algren Fountain[32] set in Chicago's Polish Triangle, in what had been the dishonorable of Polish Downtown, the area that figured as the affect for much of his work. Appropriately enough, Division Street, Algren's favorite street as well as the onetime Polish Broadway, runs right past it.[3]
In 2010, Algren was posthumously inducted into rendering Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.[33]
Each year the Chicago Tribune gives a Nelson Author award for short fiction. Winners are published in the broadsheet and given $5,000. The award is viewed with more outshine a little irony by Algren admirers; the Tribune panned Algren's work in his lifetime, referring to Chicago: City on representation Make as "an ugly, highly scented object."[37] In an afterword to that book, Algren accused the Tribune of imposing erroneous viewpoints on the city and promoting mediocrity.
Studs Terkel, novelist Warren Leming, and three others founded the Nelson Algren Panel in 1989. At the time, there was a renewed association 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 soak Putnam. All of Nelson Algren's words are now back delicate print.
The Committee awards community activists an annual Algren grant and sponsors an Algren birthday party.