Discussion Topics
Does Nelson Algren’s success at portraying the undesirable elements of society owe more to his literary technique or his personal experiences?
Can a writer who believes that “there are no absolute moral values” write a morally satisfying novel?
What suggestions does Algren convey to you by referring to Frankie Machine’s arm as “golden”?
Algren is said to regard compassion as a “fatal weakness.” Does his writing ever reveal himself as partaking of this weakness?
Discuss the claim that Algren “used popular rejection as an excuse to stop serious writing.” Algren was in many ways a man of his time. What aspects of his social criticism seem most relevant today?
Other Literary Forms
Nelson Algren is probably best known for films made from his novels The Man with the Golden Arm (1949) and A Walk on the Wild Side (1956), but his work ranges through those violent novels and short stories to Hemingwayesque essays, verse, work on the avant-garde “little magazine” Anvil, sketches on life in major cities, travel sketches, journalistic reporting, and other factual and fictional pieces about places and people who have “a weakness.”
Achievements
Best known for his novels (The Man with the Golden Arm won the first National Book Award in 1950), Nelson Algren was both a popular and critical success with his short stories, which closely resemble his novels in character, setting, and theme. His stories have appeared regularly in both the O. Henry Memorial Prize Stories and The Best American short Stories, but his popularity waned as the American reading public lost interest in naturalistic fiction. For the most part, his stories are slices of life, packed with details and dialects, grotesques and losers, yet marked with a glimmer of idealism. Influenced by Ernest Hemingway and Stephen Crane, he has served as an influence on later naturalists as John Rechy and Hubert Selby, Jr., who resemble him in their lower-class characters, urban settings, violent themes, and nightmarish vision.
Other literary forms
Although Nelson Algren (AWL-gruhn) is known primarily as a novelist, some critics believe that the short story, because it does not make the structural demands the novel does, was a more appropriate genre for him, and his The Neon Wilderness (1947) has been acclaimed one of the best collections of short stories published in the 1940’s. Chicago: City on the Make (1951) is a prose poem that has been variously described as a social document and a love poem to the city that serves as the center of Algren’s fictional world. Similar nonfiction writings include Who Lost an American? (1963), a self-described “guide to the seamier sides” of several cities, including Chicago, and Notes from a Sea Diary: Hemingway All the Way (1965); both books combine travel writing and personal essays. What little poetry Algren wrote that is not included in his novels (The Man with the Golden Arm, for example, concludes with a poem of the same title that Algren terms an “epitaph”) is included in The Last Carousel (1973), along with some unpublished stories and sketches. He also collaborated with H. E. F. Donohue on the book Conversations with Nelson Algren (1964), a series of interviews. Nelson Algren’s Own Book of Lonesome Monsters (1962), an anthology to which he contributed a preface and the concluding story, sounds Algren’s recurring theme: Human beings are always alone.
Achievements
Although Nelson Algren’s first novel, Somebody in Boots, failed commercially, it drew the attention of serious literary critics, who were even more impressed by his second novel, Never Come Morning , which won for Algren in 1947 one thousand dollars from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Also in 1947, he received a grant from the Newberry...
(This entire section contains 427 words.)
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Library to assist him in the writing ofThe Man with the Golden Arm, which subsequently received the National Book Award in 1950. Since many of the stories in The Neon Wilderness had previously appeared in the O. Henry Memorial collections or in The Best American Short Stories, Algren’s stature as a first-class writer of fiction was assured by 1950. Because his fictional world, for the most part, was Chicago, Algren is frequently linked with James T. Farrell and Richard Wright, who belong to what some critics have termed the “Chicago school.” While he denied any literary indebtedness to Farrell and Wright, Algren admitted that his work was influenced by Carl Sandburg, partly because Algren’s prose tends to the poetic, so much so that he was termed by the famous literary historian Malcolm Cowley “the poet of the Chicago slums.”
Maxwell Geismar termed Algren a “neo-naturalist” with roots in the American realistic tradition of Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Ernest Hemingway (Algren acknowledged his debt to Hemingway, who in return hailed Algren as, after William Faulkner, among America’s first writers). Unfortunately, critics, including Geismar, have also found many of the excesses of naturalism—melodrama, romanticism, oversimplification of characters and motives, and “overwriting”—in Algren’s work, which has also been assailed for its formlessness. What Algren lacks in style and form, however, he more than compensates for in rich detail and insightful observations about what George Bluestone has called the “world’s derelicts,” those unfortunates who had largely been ignored, even by those writers who were ostensibly concerned with the “lumpen proletariat.” In fact, so preoccupied is he with the victims of the American Dream, those losers customarily associated with the Great Depression, that one seldom encounters the other America in his fiction. Consequently, some readers have found his work dated, and although The Man with the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side were both adapted to film (the motion pictures were released in 1955 and 1962, respectively), thereby testifying to Algren’s popularity, his critical standing declined. From 1945 to 1960, however, he was among the most acclaimed writers in the United States because of his focus and his vision, both of which were compatible with post-World War II America.
Bibliography
Algren, Nelson. Conversations with Nelson Algren. Interviews by H. E. F. Donohue. New York: Hill & Wang, 1964. Collection of conversations between Donohue and Algren about Algren’s life and work, arranged chronologically, provides interesting biographical information. Valuable also for Algren’s comments on writing, writers, and politics.
Cappetti, Carla. Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Includes a chapter on Algren that focuses primarily on Never Come Morning. Discusses how his fiction interrupts historicity and factuality with poetic devices that prevent the reader from lapsing into simple referentiality.
Cox, Martha Heasley, and Wayne Chatterton. Nelson Algren. Boston: Twayne, 1975. Excellent assessment of Algren’s life and work. Provides a chronology, a biographical chapter, an annotated bibliography, and a helpful index.
Donohue, H. E. F. Conversations with Nelson Algren. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964. Donohue’s book consists of conversations, arranged chronologically, about Algren’s life and work and therefore serves a biographical function. The conversation “The Army and the Writing” concerns, in part, Algren’s short-story collection The Neon Wilderness, but the book is more valuable for Algren’s comments on writing, writers, and politics.
Drew, Bettina. Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1989. The only Algren biography, this volume, which is well researched and readable, mixes biographical material with publication details about Algren’s work. One chapter is devoted to The Neon Wilderness, a collection of related short stories by Algren. Supplemented by a bibliography of Algren’s work.
Giles, James R. Confronting the Horror: The Novels of Nelson Algren. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1989. Presents an analysis of Algren’s novels that is most helpful in relating the author’s naturalism to a literary tradition that extends to later writers, such as Hubert Selby, Jr., and John Rechy. Argues that Algren’s fiction reflects the author’s despair over the absurd state of humankind and the obscenity of death.
Giles, James R. “Encountering the Urban Grotesque: Nelson Algren’s Man with the Golden Arm.” In The Naturalistic Inner-City Novel in America: Encounters with the Fat Man. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. Examines Algren’s novel within the context of a group of twentieth century novels that depict urban slum dwellers in an increasingly familiar and humane manner.
Horvath, Brooke. Understanding Nelson Algren. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005. Features a brief introduction to Algren’s life and work and provides detailed analysis of Never Come Morning, The Man with the Golden Arm, A Walk on the Wild Side, and other writings. Examines Algren’s literary style, including his lyricism and humor, as well as the social and political concerns expressed in his work.
Pitts, Mary Ellen. “Algren’s El: Internalized Machine and Displaced Nature.” South Atlantic Review 52 (November, 1987): 61-74. Focuses on Chicago’s elevated railway (or “el”) as a symbol of entrapment in the inner city in Algren’s major works. Argues that the prisonlike bars of the el’s framework symbolize the circumscription of the characters’ lives and echo the “danger” of technology—the enclosing of the human mind that occurs when technology is unquestioned.
Ray, David. “Housesitting the Wild Side.” Chicago Review 41 (1995): 107-116. Anecdotal discussion of Ray’s acquaintance with Algren in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Discusses Algren’s connection with Chicago, his relationship with Simone de Beauvoir, and efforts to structure and organize Algren’s manuscripts.
Ward, Robert, ed. Nelson Algren: A Collection of Critical Essays. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007. Essays include discussions of The Man with the Golden Arm and Never Come Morning, Algren’s life and work within the context of Chicago history, and the paperback revolution and how it affected Algren’s reputation.