A short life of the author
Nelson Algren (born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham, 28 March 1909 – 9 May 1981) was an American novelist and short story writer who wrote about the people that American literature preferred to ignore — the addicts, the drifters, the prostitutes, the small-time criminals, the punch-drunk boxers, and the working poor of Chicago’s Division Street and West Madison Street — with a lyrical intensity, a moral seriousness, and a refusal to look away that made him, for a time, one of the most celebrated and most original writers in America. He was also Simone de Beauvoir’s lover, a relationship that complicated both their lives and produced some of the finest love letters in modern literature.
Early Life
Algren was born in Detroit and grew up in Chicago — specifically in the Polish neighborhoods of the Near Northwest Side, the world that would become the setting for virtually all his fiction. He graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in journalism during the worst year of the Depression, 1931, and drifted through the Southwest, riding freight trains, working odd jobs, and spending time in a Texas jail for stealing a typewriter. These experiences became the material for his first novel, Somebody in Boots (1935), a raw account of Depression-era vagrancy.
Never Come Morning (1942)
Algren’s second novel follows Bruno Bicek, a young Polish-American in Chicago who dreams of becoming a boxer but is dragged into a world of petty crime, gang violence, and sexual brutality. The novel was attacked by the Polish-American community for its unflattering portrayal of their neighborhood but was praised by critics for its unsparing realism and its lyrical prose. Richard Wright, whose Native Son had appeared two years earlier, recognised Algren as a fellow traveller in the literature of America’s dispossessed.
The Man with the Golden Arm (1949)
Algren’s masterpiece won the first National Book Award for Fiction and tells the story of Frankie Machine, a card dealer on Division Street who is addicted to morphine. The novel follows Frankie’s struggle with addiction, his deteriorating marriage, his friendship with Sparrow Saltskin (a small-time hustler), and his doomed love affair with Molly Novotny. The writing is extraordinary — dense with the sounds and rhythms of the street, alive with the speech patterns of Algren’s characters, and shot through with a compassion for human weakness that never becomes pity.
The novel was adapted into a 1955 film starring Frank Sinatra, which dealt with heroin addiction at a time when the subject was considered unfit for mainstream cinema.
A Walk on the Wild Side (1956)
A picaresque novel set in Depression-era New Orleans, following Dove Linkhorn, a semi-literate Texas drifter, through the French Quarter’s underworld of prostitution, boxing, and con games. The novel is more exuberant, more comic, and more formally experimental than The Man with the Golden Arm, and Algren considered it his best work. Critics were divided; some found it undisciplined, while others recognised its energy and invention.
Chicago: City on the Make (1951)
Algren’s prose poem about Chicago — the city he loved and hated — is one of the finest pieces of American city writing. “Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring,” he wrote, and the essay captures the city’s beauty, corruption, violence, and vitality with an intensity that has not been surpassed.
Simone de Beauvoir
Algren’s love affair with Beauvoir, which lasted from 1947 to the late 1950s, produced a passionate correspondence that has been published in several editions. Beauvoir wrote about Algren as “Lewis Brogan” in The Mandarins (1954), which won the Prix Goncourt. Algren was furious at what he considered a betrayal of their intimacy and never forgave her. The affair was one of the great literary love stories of the twentieth century.
Decline
Algren’s career declined sharply after the 1950s. He published no major fiction in the last twenty-five years of his life, struggled financially, and grew increasingly bitter about his treatment by the literary establishment. He moved to Paterson, New Jersey, and then to Sag Harbor, New York, where he died of a heart attack in 1981. He was found dead on the morning he was supposed to have been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Critical Standing
Algren’s reputation has fluctuated. At his peak, he was compared to Dostoevsky and Céline; at his nadir, he was dismissed as a sentimental naturalist. The truth lies between. His best work — The Man with the Golden Arm, A Walk on the Wild Side, The Neon Wilderness, and Chicago: City on the Make — is permanently valuable. His prose at its best has a rhythmic power and an emotional authenticity that few American writers have matched.
Collecting Algren
The Man with the Golden Arm (1949, Doubleday) in first edition with dust jacket is highly sought, bringing $300–$800. A Walk on the Wild Side (1956, Farrar, Straus) is less expensive. Chicago: City on the Make (1951, Doubleday) is collected by Chicago enthusiasts. Signed copies are scarce.