[In the following introduction to the 1986 edition of The Neon Wilderness, Carson calls the collection "the pivotal book of Nelson Algren's career" and comments on Algren's writing style and the relationship between his short stories and his novels.]

The Neon Wilderness, first published in 1947, is the pivotal book of Nelson Algren's career—the one which bid a subdued but determined farewell to everything that had earlier made him no more than just another good writer, and inaugurated the idiosyncratic, bedevilled, cantankerously poetic sensibility that would see him ranked among the few literary originals of his time. With The Neon Wilderness, Algren turned into one of the few American writers, increasingly uncommon since Dreiser, in whom compassion for the dispossessed does not involve a sort of mental portage to reach them. The great revelation for him had been that deprivation was not an abnormal social category but a human absolute, and the pressure in Neon Wilderness comes from a writer trying to measure up to the people he's writing about.

He had begun as a Depression novelist, albeit one whose conventionally patterned outrage at social injustice felt more like a fence around his material than a key to its meaning. Traces of the attitude can be found in some of the earlier pieces in this collection. But while a novel can be written to back up a thesis, the short story is more resistant to that. Its equivalent tendency is toward parable—a harder version of the truth, poetic and ineluctable rather than sociological and circumstantial. So even "A Bottle of Milk for Mother," included here, is in some ways more resonant than the novel (Never Come Morning, Algren's second) for which it provided the seed. In this version, he doesn't have to explain the interlock of events leading up to Lefty Bicek's arrest for the most useless imaginable homicide, much less stage-manage them into spelling out any acceptable sort of message, either of pity or condemnation. He can simply present Bicek, in all his terrified terribleness, as a random window on humanity.

There's an implicit condescension in most fiction about the lower depths, starting with that term for them. The writer's typical rejection of artfulness, of all literary lilt and sensuality, however manfully meant as an indictment, ends up slipping you the hint that beauty and grace are qualities somehow beyond the class of people in question. Not so for Algren, once he'd found himself. He cultivated every quicksilver ravishment of language that he knew, flinting it with a colloquialism no longer merely mimetic—although Algren could be a fictional ventriloquist of unusual attentiveness and tact, as several stories here display—but metaphorically charged, because he knew that nothing less multilayered and fine-tuned would do justice to the complicated nuance and subtle play of inner awareness that his characters were otherwise presumed to lack only because they were unable to articulate them. The best mature stories in Neon Wilderness move on a river of such openness to the details of experience, and perception so unmarred by preconception, that pigeonholing them according to their subject matter ends up seeming like a form of evasion.

Which is why the style is one of the few genuinely poetic prose styles that can also be called genuinely accurate. Once he'd learned to fly, Algren took chances with his material that no conventional proletarian writer would dare. When his people con outrageously, or blunder into the same emotional manhole they've blundered into a hundred times before, he derides them like the wised-up barkeep down the block; and the intimacy telegraphed by his humor makes those fouled-up barterings with existence painful in a way that neither he nor his readers can exclude themselves from. And it's another mark of Algren's singularity that though his characters' destiny may be tragic, the best ones' behavior isn't always seen as pathetic. Trapped they may be—but their various delusions, eccentricities, addictions and other skewings of reality are often made to appear not as symptoms but active responses, survival strategies, necessarily inventive ways of coping and sustaining some sense of self in the trap. This is understanding on a uniquely humane and unmediated level.

It seems fitting that two of the most striking stories here anticipate crucial elements of Algren's two enduring novels. In plot, "The Captain Has Bad Dreams" is no more than a circumstantial account of the nightly lineup in a Chicago precinct house. A recidivist procession of burglars, drunks, junkies, and would-be rapists, never more haunting than in their sly awareness of their own failure, play out ritualistic maneuvers of chicanery and bluff before the captain, as if in a chess tournament where each piece equals a new game. In meaning, the story is a set of freeze-frames of a man trying to make logical what could only be expressed as inchoate despair: the tension between the captain's struggle to deny that he is as much part of the wreckage as the debris before him, and his yearning to give in like them to a nihilism that seems less compromised than his own existence, has made him near to mad. It's Dostoevsky shorn of metaphysics, and all the more monstrous for being mundane. And the captain will reappear in The Man With the Golden Arm, the book acknowledged as Algren's idiosyncratic masterpiece—obsessed, by then, by a furtive lust to write his own name on the list of the guilty, even as he stalks the junkie Frankie Machine.

Meanwhile, A Walk On the Wild Side—a masterpiece so idiosyncratic that it's never been properly acknowledged at all—is foreshadowed in "The Face On the Barroom Floor." The story's Railroad Shorty, like the novel's Legless Schmidt, is an ex-fighter who's been cut in half by a train, and now wheels himself around on a leather-strapped handmade platform. Under either name, he's a great creation—a cripple that you can't feel sorry for. His massive self-sufficiency commands only apprehensive respect; it's the most massively admirable quality he has, and yet it's what turned him into the monster that his deformity alone never could. A younger man (the novel's hero Dove Linkhorn, in the story a bespectacled bartender nicknamed "Fancy"), as determined to break free of callowness as the cripple is of ever being seen as weak, challenges the latter's authority by attempting to sever his one human link, the hooker whose bed he shares while refusing to do the same with her money. In the brutality that ensues, Fancy is beaten to a pulp, and the cripple loses his human connection anyway—he recoils, not in disgust but in self-disgust, from the woman's delight in the reason for the beating. But none of them could have acted in any other way—at least not without relinquishing their struggle for an identity of their own, the only battlefield where the outcome is still open for them. Futile, and awful, it may be; but meaningless—no.

But the claim for Neon Wilderness doesn't rest only on the preludes it offers to Algren's subsequent work. Look, for instance, at the desperate, wondrously written "Design For Departure." A rather ordinary young woman slips, less down than sideways, into hooking and addiction—dreamily, but her dreaminess long outlasts her hopes. Finally, she comes to see herself as the Virgin Mary, and her lover-connection as Christ. But her insanity, instead of being characterized as pathetic, is merely witnessed: it's the thing that lets her go on living in an unbearable situation. Or else read, in "Depend On Aunt Elly," about another woman submitting to a scheming jailer's blackmail in order to regain her freedom after being unjustly sent to prison, and fatalistically accepting her lover's leaving her when he finds out about it; and notice how, in Algren's telling, even anger ultimately gets subsumed within a sense of all-abiding mystery. There is, in this book, a great deal of wonderful writing; and a number of people, places, feelings, and truths that you may never have met, seen, or known, but that you'll never be able to stop yourself from recognizing once the book is closed.