Algren, Nelson | John Woodburn (review date 1947)
John Woodburn (review date 1947)
SOURCE: "People of the Abyss," in The New York Times Book Review, February 2, 1947, p. 16.
[In the following review of The Neon Wilderness, Woodburn states that the collection is uneven but praises Algren's sympathetic characterization.]
The world of Nelson Algren's The Neon Wilderness is like James T. Farrell's, one he never made. It is not the same world as Farrell's, however, despite the fact that all but eight of these twenty-four brutal, pitiful and piteous stories occur in Chicago, among the streets and alleyways where Studs Lonigan and Danny O'Neill traced their wayward patterns. For Algren's is an Existential world, a sunless place of whispering, tangible shadows, where nightmare becomes a dense reality, and the future is slain by the intolerable present.
Algren's people are residents of the abyss. They are the ones who came to the end of the road and did not stop, and...
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