[In the review of The Neon Wilderness below, Brown praises Algren's portrayal of the downtrodden and discusses the plots of various stories.]

The challenge of the short story must be infinitely compelling to those writers willing to meet it. The demands of a limited scope make incident, character, and mood tight and tellingly heightened. Economy of things said, of those things left unsaid, can be memorable when practised well. Chekhov in three pages paints a portrait; Hemingway does an entire underworld story in not many words; O. Henry gives us middle-class goodness; and Saroyan makes man's loneliness a poignant dream. It is the author's undercurrent theme in any good collection of short stories that serves to unite the whole.

In [The Neon Wilderness] Mr. Algren cries out for the under-dog. It is, in a quote from "The City" by David Wolff, "the usurpation of man over man" with which he deals. It is the dregs, the underprivileged, the eternally downtrodden, who people his pages. Some of them scarcely dream; they only live in fear of arrest, starvation, or sudden death. Their city is Chicago. It is the great throbbing city of Whitman painted by Reginald Marsh. The men are tough-fibered, living by lies, their wits, or their fists. Their women love them and are loyal to whatever profession they serve. There is no justice, no hope for any, nor is there much joy. By the same token, there is no judgment on these poor lost souls. Walt Whitman's attitude, "I feel I am of them—I belong to those convicts and prostitutes myself and henceforth I will not deny them—for how can I deny myself?" represents Mr. Algren's approach.

Each of the twenty-four stories creates its own mood. Except for three of them, the plots are played in taverns, cheap hotels; and city streets. In "that's the way it's always been" the scene shifts to war's theatre and a bitter Willie-and-Joe indictment of a despicable brass hat. "The Heroes" is also a war story, the most humorous of the entire lot. Here is an American-born Indian who patterns himself on the Hollywood conception of the red man. His dialogue is perfect; he typecasts his comrades, his enemies, and his commanders. He feels Custer made a mistake in taking his last stand; he actually does not think he would have gone West "because who'd want to leave Olivia De Havilland to all those Washington wolves?" I think Corporal Hardheart, affectionately known as Chief Booze-heart, is one of the happier figures. Another is the Negro who finds his longing for home satisfied in Algiers. He goes there AWOL, content with his Algerienne, "and across the waters . . . he heard the great bell tolling, tolling from the lion-colored hills of home." He has found peace.

For the others there is drink, dope, and jail. Unforgettable and powerful is the fearful story of the legless man, his burlesque queen mistress, and his fight to the finish with Fancy, the bartender, in "the face on the bar-room floor." This is Mr. Algren's strongest moment. There is enough horror, ugliness, and ghoulishness in it to satify Sartre. In another vein we get evil fantasy and a logical motive for degradation in "how the devil came down division street." Then there is bitterness in "the children"; poetry and faith in "poor man's pennies"; terrible conquest in "depend on aunt elly"; and, in the first story, "the captain has bad dreams," a nightmare line-up of what is to follow.

Mr. Algren is a definite apostle of amorality. Either through environment or inheritance, his people are completely devoid of any ability to recognize, let alone live by, conventional standards of so-called good citizenship. Conditioned by struggle, their instincts are all for the end, without even a passing nod to the means.

The e.e. cummings trick of no capital letters seems a slight irritant to me. The sometimes special phrases of prize-fighting or of the gangster world make for effortful reading. However, after the initial shudder, the staccato precision of the writing must be read, remembered, and admired.