free-form novels of the Frenchman Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Algren’s prose catches what he called the poetry of human speech, its rhythms and repetitions, while repeated catch-phrases and song lyrics give it both a dreamlike quality and structural cohesiveness. A mix of specific details, low-life jargon, and well-observed idiosyncrasies of thought and behavior make this style both realistically exact and lyrically grim, though occasionally overwritten. Characteristic is the heavily symbolic and colorful imagery that conveys a nearly pervasive foreboding, as inThe Man with the Golden Arm.Goggling upward at it, shivering a bit in the shabby coat, he felt for a moment as if he, too, were something impaled on city wires for only tenement winds to touch.

Leaving out the spare parts, as he put it, Algren created an unorthodox grammar of fragments and short run-ons arranged to suggest the movement of thought and able to convey a wide range of moods, from the contemplative to the urgent. In these ways, he communicated mental states that his uneducated characters could not articulate for themselves.

From 1935 to 1981, Algren wrote only five novels. Though able to churn out stories and articles for money, he was never able to write his novels easily. Never planned, each developed by a process of aggregation as he expanded it from the inside. To complete this difficult process, Algren needed firsthand experience, but he became increasingly isolated. This partly explains why he completed so few long works; he was also hindered by increasing bitterness about his place in American letters.

Identifying with the writers of the 1930’s, who were poor but committed, Algren was critical of the literary scene after World War II. Not only was he ambivalent about the prosperity of other artists (which his gambling habit denied him anyway), but he also considered himself to be the victim of an anti-Communist backlash that he believed extended into literature through the auspices of the New Criticism. This movement removed writing from its social context, dismissing special pleading for a social cause in the belief that true art is self-contained. Attacking this as falsely limiting, Algren believed that “literature is made upon any occasion when a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.”

Unfortunately, in the turbulent political climate of the 1950’s, when to be liberal was to be suspect, many critics turned their backs on the social issues, dismissing Algren’s work as sentimental and romantic. Yet the responsibility for his meager output was Algren’s also, as he abdicated control of his own artistic life, choosing to see himself as a victim.

Never Come Morning

First published: 1942

Type of work: Novel

A young boxer from Chicago’s slums destroys himself in his struggle for identity and independence.

Never Come Morning, like all of Algren’s novels, is a study of doom working itself out. Bruno “Lefty” Bicek is a young Polish American imprisoned in the Polish slums of Chicago, so oppressively isolated that the outside filters through only in films and tabloids. These promise a glorified version of success, but the American Dream is closer to nightmare in this world of police lineups, gangs, petty crime, and brothels. Here everyone is either the hunter or the hunted, who have nothing to lose but are too worried about being cheated of what they are owed to trust anyone else.

Like the rest, Bruno, hungering for boxing glory, scorns the Old World values of hard work and religious faith, but he is not strong enough to live by the New World’s capitalistic code of violence and deception. Bruno thinks of himself as a wolf, but he is a dreamer instead of a schemer; though sensitive and humane, he is too crippled by conscience to protect himself and too insecure to protect others. Despite his boxing prowess, he cannot stand up to his more brutal inferiors, either the knife-wielding Fireball Kodadek or the blackmailing Bonifacy “the barber” Konstantine, who wants to control his boxing career.

In a world where everything is a cheat, love seems as false as every other promise, but to destroy love in Algren’s novels is to destroy oneself. This is what happens when Bruno, asserting himself as a gang leader, seduces and betrays Steffi Rostenkowski. Steffi, born with similarly limited choices, gives in to Bruno because he seems the best she can expect. Then Bruno, unsure of himself and afraid of Kodadek’s knife, lets the rest of the gang have their way with Steffi. After this, Bruno’s fate is sealed. Stubbornly proud, he channels his shame into rage, murdering a Greek outsider trying to join in the rape.

Knowing that there can be no forgiveness for killing Steffi “in his heart,” he is ready to accept any punishment and goes to jail for a crime he did not commit. Still in search of forgiveness, he returns and gets a job at Mama Tomek’s brothel where Steffi, now Bonifacy’s mistress, works. Hoping to free Steffi and himself, Bruno establishes his independence by arranging his own boxing match and proves his manhood by beating up Bonifacy’s henchmen. All escape is illusory, however; Bruno wins in the boxing ring, but only for Bonifacy to denounce him to the police for the Greek’s murder.

Never Come Morning is a stylistic improvement over Somebody in Boots, with complex shifts in tone and pacing, subtler characters, and well-developed scenes. The brothel scenes, in particular, are praised for their authenticity and compassionate understanding, conveying simultaneously the comic and the threatening. Critics differ about this and other digressions in the novel, however, which weaken the story’s tension to dwell on capitalism’s oppressive exploitation. To heighten the sense of futility and hopelessness, Algren uses images of imprisonment and rain. Equally bitter are the song lyrics whose cheerfulness is merely ironic in a dark world where people are compared to mutilated flies and decapitated dolls. In many parts, the story often pushed to the side, Never Come Morning reads like a mood poem on the imminence of violence and death.

The Man with the Golden Arm

First published: 1949

Type of work: Novel

Doomed from the beginning, card dealer Frankie Machine struggles hopelessly against drug addiction and guilt.

The Man with the Golden Arm, Algren’s one great popular success, caught public attention because of the then-shocking drug addiction of its protagonist. For Algren, this aspect—a late addition to the novel—merely contributed to the story of the self-destructive relationship of Francis Majcinek, known as Frankie Machine because of his skill as a dealer, and his possessive, hypochondriacal wife, Sophie (or Zosh).

Like all Algren protagonists, Frankie is not as tough as he pretends; he talks big, but he is a coward who dreams of becoming a drummer. His fixer, Nifty Louis Fomorowsky, sees immediately that Frankie is among the world’s sheep, not the shearers, and that like so many, he chooses his addiction and his doom. As always in Algren’s work, when strength is used, it leads to violence and self-destruction; in an unthinking moment, Frankie kills Louie.

The wheelchair-bound Sophie is the most complicated female character in any of Algren’s novels. Her pride stung by Frankie’s indifference to her love, she had trapped him into marriage with a false pregnancy. Now, though there is nothing wrong with her legs, she insists that Frankie crippled her in a driving accident, binding him all the tighter to her through guilt. Throughout the book, she becomes more demanding and destructively compulsive, driving Frankie away while descending into insanity. Instead of abandoning her, Frankie makes halfhearted attempts to please her, because “a guy got to draw the line somewheres on how bad he can treat somebody who can’t help herself no more just account of him.” Unfortunately, Frankie does not know where to draw the line and so relies on morphine.

In another characteristic Algren touch, it does not matter that Frankie became addicted by chance in an Army hospital. He is doomed anyway, because he cannot rid himself of this “monkey on his back” (a phrase introduced into general use with this novel). For Algren there are no fresh starts, even though trust and love always hold out hope. Molly Novotny offers love to Frankie, but he cannot accept it because his tortured guilt over Sophie alienates him more and more from himself.

In the novel’s world, self-destruction is pursued in the hope of penance, and Frankie gets his one chance for redemption when he is caught shoplifting. In prison, he breaks his addiction, only to return to Division Street and find that Molly is gone, Sophie is crazy, and the one person he trusted, Sparrow “Solly” Saltskin, has betrayed his trust. When he loses his touch with cards, Frankie goes back on drugs, while the tenacious police captain Record Head Bednar uses Sparrow, as well as Frankie’s own addiction, to nail him for Louie’s killing. On the run, wounded and exhausted, Frankie hangs himself in a flophouse.

In no other novel did Algren mix serious, lyrical, and comic elements to such effect. Writing it, he still thought that books could change society because “every man was secretly against the law in his heart . . . and it was the heart that mattered.” Believing that there are no absolute moral values—only people—Algren rated compassion over justice, especially that based on property laws, and he tried in this novel to move the reader to believe that as well.

This is particularly clear in the example of the tortured police captain, Record Head Bednar, who has an answer for every pathetic excuse except when an arrested man says, “We are all members of one another.” As the one responsible for arresting criminals, Bednar finally admits, but cannot embrace, his identification with the “guilty” who are closer to redemption than he is because he denies his connection with them. Instead, he continues his spiritual con game, apportioning society’s justice when he is “more lost, more fallen and more alone than any man at all.”

Though Algren was the grandson of a convert to Judaism and the son of a Jewish mother, it is Christian imagery that predominates in this book, though in an inverted manner. Everyone is guilty. Christ is the accuser, not the savior, as no one can be saved. All the characters feel crucified or impaled, but there is no afterlife, no point to the suffering, only death: “When you come to the end it’s the end, that’s all.” There was some criticism of the book’s loose two-part structure, and Algren regretted its chase ending, but the novel excels in its focus on mood. The author cared more for changes of consciousness as the characters suffer the consequences of destroyed love than for plot. In depicting this, Algren’s style is at its finest. Algren used jargon accurately and drew his lively images from the characters’ lives: “He still looked like the business end of a fugitive warrant to Frankie.”

At its best, the writing is both realistic in matter of detail and grim in tone, and it manages a lyrical quality with its freewheeling grammar. “Caught between the dealer’s slot and the cat-gray stroke of the years, Frankie saw a line of endless girders wet with the rain of those years to be. Where all night long, in that far time, the same all-night salamanders burned. Burned just as they had so long ago. Before the world went wrong. And any gray cat had purred at all.”

At the same time, humor is used more and to more effect than in his earlier novels, in keeping with Algren’s sense of the absurd in all human matters, even the tragic. Consequently, the comic elements provide more than laughs: They resonate with foreboding and the horror of life’s meaninglessness. For example, the alcoholic dog Rumdum is redeemed, though Frankie is doomed, along with the whole colorful cast of grotesques at the Tug & Maul who drink their lives away. The near-slapstick affair between Sparrow and Vi, whose old husband, Stash Koskoska, is a slow-witted old man with a taste for day-old bread and cut-rate Polish sausage, affords more than comic relief. This travesty of marriage heightens, by contrast, the oppressiveness of Frankie and Zosh’s mutual hell.

A Walk on the Wild Side

First published: 1956

Type of work: Novel

The wise fool Dove Linkhorn sets out to conquer women and the world, only to be thoroughly vanquished.

A Walk on the Wild Side started as a revision of Somebody in Boots, but as it progressed, Algren transformed his serious first novel into a parody of the American Dream. Algren justified this on the grounds that, times having changed, he had to entertain readers. Moreover, disgusted by the triumph of materialism, he no longer believed that writing could change attitudes, only mock them. This apparently defensive response betrays a lack of confidence in what some critics considered to be a great idiosyncratic masterpiece of the absurd that prepared the way for such writers as Thomas Pynchon, Ken Kesey, Joseph Heller, and Hunter S. Thompson.

Dove Linkhorn is the last of a line of poor Texas rebels against authority. Illiterate but canny, Dove is a loser who is too innocent to feel like a loser. Incapable of recognizing society’s moral code, and so amoral, he does know when he has betrayed those who helped him. Deprived of any meaningful childhood, as Algren may have believed he himself was, Dove at sixteen wants two things, education and love, which he finds in Terasina Vidavarri. While trying to teach Dove the alphabet, she awakens his indefatigable virility, convincing him that he is a born world shaker. When she resists his later advances, he rapes her and flees, only to find he can escape neither his love nor his guilt for violating the reverence he feels for her.

In his subsequent adventures, he meets a cast of strange, but human, characters. He is as odd as the others, certainly, a wise fool, practically a cartoon figure. He learns the ways of the road from Kitty Twist; however, as so often happens in Algren’s works, the man lets the woman down. She gets caught during a robbery while he manages to escape, going on to sell door-to-door and work in a condom factory before having his great success as the Big Stingaree, “deflowerer” of “virgins” in a sex show. This rise to the top of the bottom is central to Algren’s parody. In one scene, Dove watches a headless turtle crawl to the top of a pile of decapitated turtles before toppling to the bottom, where there is always room for one more. Dove himself slides to the bottom when he runs off with a teacher turned prostitute, whose lover, the legless Achilles Schmidt, will eventually blind Dove during a savage beating just after he learns to read.

Despite the many amusing and colorful scenes set in brothels and condom factories, the book’s core is its examination of love and guilt. Love is resisted because it can kill, as it does the little girl who goes after her doll under the wheels of a train, or threaten one’s self-sufficiency, as it does Schmidt’s. Dove rebels against Terasina’s power, only to learn that violence renders him permanently dependent through guilt. Initially, domination may seem the only basis for emotional relationships in a society that rewards deceit and force, but violence puts a man beyond salvation by destroying his contact with others.

Though less preachy than Somebody in Boots, A Walk on the Wild Side indicts a society where there is “self-reliance for the penniless and government help to the rich” and where the men who profit from vice are the very ones who inveigh against it and where the losers are jailed, having been given their “chance.” During the Depression, the ladder of success was inverted; everyone was on the street hustling for a living and selling something. Dove is warned to watch out for trust and friends, but he comes to wonder if he wants success when it is always at the expense of “them who have already been whipped.”

At the end, as Schmidt beats Dove’s face into a bloody pulp, others stand around and exult “as though each fresh blow redeemed that blow that his life had been to him.” Algren believed that this is what capitalism reduces people to: the violence of despair. When the same crowd rushes Schmidt to his death, he goes as “a saint of the amputees,” knowing that he has done their work for them. This Christ-like acceptance of guilt and connection with others is the only salvation the world offers: Dove returns home, ready for love at last and hoping Terasina will take him in.

The Neon Wilderness

First published: 1947

Type of work: Short stories

In realistically grim and lyrically idiosyncratic portraits, Algren depicts America’s down-and-out.

With The Neon Wilderness, Algren emerged as a mature and original spokesman for a whole class of people usually excluded from literature except as marginal and stereotyped caricatures. In place of the condescending tone of most writing about the poor, Algren demonstrates the compassion of a man determined to live up to the people he is writing about. The stories bristle with many of Algren’s characteristic thematic and stylistic concerns. The more focused short-story form undermines his didactic, Communist streak, and though there are times when Algren sentimentalizes his characters, this does not diminish the overall power of these stories.

“So Help Me,” his first published story, is a dramatic monologue using a favorite Algren device, the interrogation of a criminal. His use here of only the criminal’s voice lessens the effect, but the solidity of detail and attention to human voice create a convincing account of human isolation and the inevitability of violence, those constants of Algren’s work. Another characteristic touch is the repeated use of the title phrase, prompting both sympathy and doubt.

In “Design for Departure,” one of his attempts to write an important story, Algren carefully creates the urban jungle motif and brings out the religious parallels in this story of Mary and Christiano, victims of psychological and economic deprivation. Born into a world of despair, Mary wants only to die, and her whole life is directed toward that departure as she succumbs to the pervasive sense of doom. Unable to connect with the world, she suffers through an unloving upbringing, drug addiction, and prostitution before finally committing suicide. Deaf Christy, who helps her die when he cannot save her, is one of a whole line of cripples in Algren’s writing who are brutal yet not vicious so much as callous and spiritually starved.

The ending teeters between the moving and the sentimental, and some critics prefer Algren’s more spontaneous stories. With “How the Devil Came Down Division Street,” Algren dashed off one of his first comic masterpieces. Outrageous and bizarre, this supernatural story is told with a casual air that belies its grim moral, that the salvation of one character often necessitates the perdition of another. Irony is equally pronounced in “Depend on Aunt Elly,” a bitter love story about a prizefighter and a prostitute. Despite their devotion to each other and their recognition that they are each other’s only salvation, their lives are so determined that neither talent nor courage is proof against the simple bad luck of being who they are and being at the mercy of a greed more powerful than love.

Algren worked several of these stories into his novels. “A Bottle of Milk for Mother,” for example, tells of the accidental shooting for which Bruno “Lefty” Bicek takes the rap in the middle segment of Never Come Morning. Another interrogation story, this is an improvement over “So Help Me” because of the use of character interaction and an ironic narrator to depict Bruno’s self-incrimination under Captain Kozak’s masterful questioning. Kozak is one of Algren’s weary, guilt-haunted but clever cops, such as the captain in “The Captain Has Bad Dreams,” used in The Man with the Golden Arm.

In “The Face on the Barroom Floor,” later refashioned as the end of A Walk on the Wild Side, a thoughtless comment sparks a murderous brawl between Railroad Shorty, a powerful fighter cut in half by a train, and a callow young bartender. The story is a graphic tale of the inevitability of violence, given the desperate need for identity and self-respect in a world that denies them.

Throughout the book, characters are not seen as warped or degenerate but as ordinary humans with their lives twisted by circumstances. Their aberrant behavior is, for them, the active expression of their individuality, their defense in a world where violence and deceit are necessary because the highest value is survival and morality is useless. In “A Lot You Got to Holler,” for example, the protagonist says, “I was always in the clear so long as I was truly guilty. But the minute my motives were honest someone would finger me.”