[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 are now too damaged to return. Outlawed and lost, their lives, if they may be said to be alive, have become feral and instinctual, and their acts seem more the convulsive reflexes of dangling men than gestures of volition. A starved alley-cat, spitting with a broken back, is as sensible of its predicament as are these cornered ones. They share with the alley-cat a kind of animal innocence, and it is this, and only this, which elevates them to moments of simple tragedy, all other dignity being denied them.

As a collection, The Neon Wilderness has its mountains and valleys; it is both monotonous and uneven. There is so little light here, one story throwing its thick shadow on another, that some of the individual impact is lost. But a few of the stories rise strongly above the monotone and leave a scar on the memory. The best of these, in my opinion, is "Design for Departure," which tells in one story of a frightened girl a whole life that was never lived. Then, as among the mountains, I shall remember "A Bottle of Milk for Mother," and the Polish-American hoodlum chattering with hopeless, braggart cunning in the police station; and the almost unbearable scorn and pity of "The Children," in which sniggering, vicious adolescents prance through a Hiawatha pageant in a House of Correction.

I wish Mr. Algren had not fallen in love with the compound adjective "pavement-colored," and did not strive so hard for arresting titles. But, uneven as this collection is, it shows Nelson Algren's power, the magnificent anger and indignation with which he articulates the lives of these ruined and invalidated people. He is deeply and pitifully concerned with them, and he is determined that we should be aware of them, that we should see, as he sees, the personal delinquency of his characters dissolve within the greater, more terrible delinquency of our synthetic society.