Nelson Algren

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 the National Book Award and was adapted as the 1955 film of the same name.

Algren articulated the world of "drunks, pimps, prostitutes, freaks, drug addicts, prize fighters, corrupt politicians, and hoodlums". Art Shay singled out a poem Algren wrote from the perspective of a "halfy," street slang for a legless man on wheels. Shay said that Algren considered this poem to be a key to everything he had ever written. The protagonist talks about "how forty wheels rolled over his legs and how he was ready to strap up and give death a wrestle."

According to Harold Augenbraum, "in the late 1940s and early 1950s he was one of the best known literary writers in America." The lover of French writer Simone de Beauvoir, he is featured in her novel '' The Mandarins'', set in Paris and Chicago. He was called "a sort of bard of the down-and-outer""1950"
Harold Augenbraum and Rachel Kushner. ''60 Years of Honoring Great American Books'' (book-a-day blog), June 18, 2009. National Book Foundation. Retrieved February 6, 2018.
Augenbraum was the executive director of the National Book Foundation, marking the 60-year anniversary of the National Book Award for Fiction, as resumed after the war. Algren won the first one. based on this book, 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 of the same name (directed by Edward Dmytryk, screenplay by John Fante).

Life

Algren was born in Detroit, Michigan, 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 convert to Judaism and of a German Jewish woman, and his mother was of German Jewish descent. (She owned a candy 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 Crossing section of the South Side.

When he was eight, his family moved from the far South Side to an apartment at 4834 N. Troy Street, in the North Side neighborhood of Albany Park. His father worked as an auto mechanic nearby on North Kedzie Avenue.

In his essay '' Chicago: City on the Make'', Algren added autobiographical details: he recalled being teased by neighborhood children after moving to Troy Street because he was a fan of the South Side White Sox. Despite living most of his life on the North Side, Algren never changed his affiliation and remained a White Sox fan.

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, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in journalism during the Great Depression in 1931. During his time at the University of Illinois, he wrote for the ''Daily Illini'' student newspaper.

Literary career and marriage

Algren wrote his first story, "So Help Me", in 1933, while he was in Texas working at a gas station. Before returning to Chicago, he was caught stealing a typewriter from an empty classroom at Sul Ross State University in Alpine. He boarded a train for his getaway but was apprehended and returned to Alpine. He was held in jail for nearly five months and faced a possible additional three years in prison. 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.

In 1935 Algren won the first of his three O. Henry Awards for his short story, "The Brother's House." The story was first published in '' Story'' magazine and was reprinted in an anthology of O. Henry Award winners.

His first novel, '' Somebody in Boots'' (1935), was later dismissed by Algren as primitive and politically naive, claiming he infused it with Marxist ideas he little understood, because they were fashionable at the time. The book was unsuccessful and went out of print.

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.

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 first great flourishing." It portrays the dead-end life of a doomed young Polish-American boxer turned criminal. Ernest Hemingway, in a July 8, 1942, letter to his publisher Maxwell Perkins, said of the novel: "I think it very, very good. It is as fine and good stuff to come out of Chicago." The novel offended members of Chicago's large Polish-American community, some of whose members denounced it as pro-Axis propaganda. Not knowing that Algren was of partly Jewish descent, some incensed Polish-American Chicagoans said he was pro-Nazi Nordic. His Polish-American critics persuaded Mayor Edward Joseph Kelly to ban the novel from the Chicago Public Library.

Military service

Algren served as a private in the European Theater of World War II as a litter bearer. Despite being a college graduate, he was denied entry into Officer Candidate School. There is conjecture that it may have 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 desire to serve in the war but was drafted in 1943. An indifferent soldier, he dealt on the black market while he was stationed in France. He received a bad beating by some fellow black marketeers.

Fame

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 American Academy of Arts and Letters and a grant from Chicago's Newberry Library.

It was in that same year that Algren had an affair with Simone de Beauvoir. Mary Guggenheim, who had been Algren's lover, recommended De Beauvoir visit Algren in Chicago. The couple would summer together in Algren's cottage in the lake front community of Miller Beach, Indiana, and also travel 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 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 and Beauvoir eventually became disenchanted with each other, and a bitter Algren wrote of Beauvoir and Sartre 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.

Algren's next novel, '' The Man with the Golden Arm'' (1949), would become his best known work. It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1950."National Book Awards – 1950"
National Book Foundation. Retrieved March 31, 2012.
(With essays by Rachel Kushne and Harold Augenbraum from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.) 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. He is married to a woman whom he mistakenly believes became crippled in a car accident he caused.

Algren's next book, '' Chicago: City on the Make'' (1951), was a scathing essay that outraged the city's boosters but portrayed the back alleys of the city, its dispossessed, its corrupt politicians and its swindlers. Algren also declared his love of the City as a "lovely so real".

''The Man With the Golden Arm'' was adapted as a 1955 movie of the same name, starring Frank Sinatra and directed and produced by Otto Preminger. Algren soon withdrew from direct involvement. It was a commercial success but Algren loathed the film. He sued Preminger seeking an injunction to stop him from claiming ownership of the property as "An Otto Preminger film", but he soon withdrew his suit for financial reasons.

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.

Algren had another commercial success with the novel '' A Walk on the Wild Side'' (1956). He reworked some of the material from his first novel, ''Somebody in Boots'', as well as picking up elements from several published short stories, such as his 1947 "The Face on the Barroom Floor". The novel was about a wandering Texan adrift during the early years of the Great Depression. He said it was superior to the earlier book. It was adapted as the 1962 movie of the same name. Some critics thought the film bowdlerized the book, and it was not commercially successful.

Decline and second marriage

''A Walk on the Wild Side'' was Algren's last commercial success. He turned 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 married that year and divorced in 1967. According to Kurt Vonnegut, who taught with him at Iowa in 1965, Algren's "enthusiasm for writing, reading and gambling left little time for the duties of a married man."

Algren played a small part in Philip Kaufman's underground comedy '' Fearless Frank'' (1967) as a mobster named Needles.

In 1968, he signed the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

According to Bettina Drew's biography, Algren angled for a journalism job in South Vietnam. 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 dealing on the black market.

Hurricane Carter and Paterson, 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

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