Nelson Algren

The fiction and reportage included in The Last Carousel, one of the final collections published during Nelson Algren's lifetime, was written on ships and in ports of call around the world, and includes accounts of brothels in Vietnam and Mexico, stories of the boxing ring, and reminiscences of Algren's beloved Chicago White Sox, among other subjects. In this collection, not just Algren's intensity but his diversity are revealed and celebrated.

The struggle to write with deep emotion is the subject of this extraordinary book, the previously unpublished credo of one of America's greatest 20th-century writers." You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich," writes Nelson Algren in his only longer work of nonfiction, adding: "A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery." Nonconformity is about 20th-century America: "Never on the earth of man has he lived so tidily as here amidst such psychological disorder." And it is about the trouble writers ask for when they try to describe America: "Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards . . . where there] are still . . . defeats in which everything is lost and] victories that fall close enough to the heart to afford living hope." In Nonconformity, Algren identifies the essential nature of the writer's relation to society, drawing examples from Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Twain, and Fitzgerald, as well as utility infielder Leo Durocher and legendary barkeep Martin Dooley. He shares his deepest beliefs about the state of literature and its role in society, along the way painting a chilling portrait of the early 1950s, Joe McCarthy's heyday, when many American writers were blacklisted and ruined for saying similar things to what Algren is saying here.

As rock and roll novelist Tom Carson writes in his introduction, The Neon Wilderness 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 times. Algren's classic 1947 short story collection is the pure vein Algren would mine for all his subsequent novels and stories. The stories in this collection are literary triumphs that don't fade away. Among the stories included here are A Bottle of Milk for Mother, about a Chicago youth being cornered for a murder, and The Face on the Barrome Floor, in which a legless man pummels another man nearly to death--the seeds that would grow into the novel Never Come Morning. Algren's World War II stories whose final expression would be in the novel The Man with the Golden Arm are also part of this collection. So Help Me, Algren's first published work, is here. Other stories include, The Captain Has Bad Dreams, in which Algren first introduced the character of the blameless captain who feels such a heavy burden of guilt and wonders why the criminal offenders he sees seem to feel no guilt at all. And then there is Design for Departure, in which a young woman drifting into hooking and addiction sees her own dreaminess outlasting her hopes.

A novel of rare genius, The Man with the Golden Arm describes the dissolution of a card-dealing WWII veteran named Frankie Machine, caught in the act of slowly cutting his own heart into wafer-thin slices. For Frankie, a murder committed may be the least of his problems. The literary critic Malcolm Cowley called The Man with the Golden Arm "Algren's defense of the individual," while Carl Sandburg wrote of its "strange midnight dignity." A literary tour de force, here is a novel unlike any other, one in which drug addiction, poverty, and human failure somehow suggest a defense of human dignity and a reason for hope. Seven Stories Press separately publishes the critical edition of The Man with the Golden Arm, the first critical edition of an Algren work, featuring an extra 100+ pages of insightful essays by Russell Banks, Bettina Drew, James R. Giles, Carlo Rotella, William Savage, Lee Stringer, Studs Terkel, Kurt Vonnegut, and others.

Never Come Morning is unique among the novels of Algren. The author's only romance, the novel concerns Bruno Bicek, a would-be boxer from Chicago's Northwest side, and Steffi, the woman who shares his dream while living his nightmare. It is an unusual and brilliant book, said The New York Times. A bold scribbling upon the wall for comfortable Americans to ponder and digest. This new edition features an introduction by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and an interview with Nelson Algren by H. E. F. Donohue.

The struggle to write with deep emotion is the subject of this extraordinary book, the previously unpublished credo of one of America's greatest twentieth-century writers." You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich," writes Nelson Algren in his only longer work of nonfiction, adding: "A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery." Nonconformity is about twentieth-century America: "Never on the earth of man has he lived so tidily as here amidst such psychological disorder." And it is about the trouble writers ask for when they try to describe America: "Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards ... where there] are still ... defeats in which everything is lost and] victories that fall close enough to the heart to afford living hope." In Nonconformity, Algren identifies the essential nature of the writer's relation to society, drawing examples from Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Twain, and Fitzgerald, as well as utility infielder Leo Durocher and legendary barkeep Martin Dooley. He shares his deepest beliefs about the state of literature and its role in society, along the way painting a chilling portrait of the early 1950s, Joe McCarthy's heyday, when many American writers were blacklisted and ruined for saying similar things to what Algren is saying here.

The struggle to write with deep emotion is the subject of this extraordinary book, the previously unpublished credo of one of America's greatest twentieth-century writers." You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich," writes Nelson Algren in his only longer work of nonfiction, adding: "A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery." Nonconformity is about twentieth-century America: "Never on the earth of man has he lived so tidily as here amidst such psychological disorder." And it is about the trouble writers ask for when they try to describe America: "Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards ... where there] are still ... defeats in which everything is lost and] victories that fall close enough to the heart to afford living hope." In Nonconformity, Algren identifies the essential nature of the writer's relation to society, drawing examples from Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Twain, and Fitzgerald, as well as utility infielder Leo Durocher and legendary barkeep Martin Dooley. He shares his deepest beliefs about the state of literature and its role in society, along the way painting a chilling portrait of the early 1950s, Joe McCarthy's heyday, when many American writers were blacklisted and ruined for saying similar things to what Algren is saying here.

Nelson Algren was a renowned writer, known for his penetrating and influential social novels such as The Man With the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side. Originally published in 1935, Somebody in Boots was Algren's first novel, based on his experiences living in Texas during the Great Depression. A wonderful companion to Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, this new edition of Somebody in Boots features an introduction by Colin Asher, who is writing a forthcoming biography of Algren.

"Once you've become a part of this particular patch, you'll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real." Ernest Hemingway once said of Nelson Algren's writing that "you should not read it if you cannot take a punch." The prose poem, Chicago: City on the Make, filled with language that swings and jabs and stuns, lives up to those words. In this sixtieth anniversary edition, Algren presents 120 years of Chicago history through the lens of its "nobodies nobody knows" the tramps, hustlers, aging bar fighters, freed death-row inmates, and anonymous working stiffs who prowl its streets. Upon its original publication in 1951, Algren's Chicago: City on the Make was scorned by the Chicago Chamber of Commerce and local journalists for its gritty portrayal of the city and its people, one that boldly defied City Hall's business and tourism initiatives. Yet the book captures the essential dilemma of Chicago: the dynamic tension between the city's breathtaking beauty and its utter brutality, its boundless human energy and its stifling greed and violence. The sixtieth anniversary edition features historic Chicago photos and annotations on everything from defunct slang to Chicagoans, famous and obscure, to what the Black Sox scandal was and why it mattered. More accessible than ever, this is, as Studs Terkel says, "the best book about Chicago."

"There is pleasure of a hard and real sort here even for those who have never read Algren before. Of course, the specifics of his world, of his Chicago, have changed. But the human condition and social inequities he saw are still with us."--"Chicago Tribune" "Among the most serious and moving in American literature... With these books, Algren defined postwar American urban fiction, interweaving threads of social realism, his own leftist politics and noir."--"Los Angeles Times""Nelson Algren has been acknowledged as a master of that American Realism touched with poetry, which attempts to give voice to the insulted and injured. He is a philosopher of deprivation, a moral force of considerable dimensions, and a wonderful user of the language."--Donald Barthelme"So long, baby . . . walk pretty all the way," says Ralph to his fourteen-year-old girlfriend on her way to the wild side, in the last story Nelson Algren ever published, gathered here in a treasure trove of previously uncollected fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews. Published during the centennial year of Algren's birth, "Entrapment and Other Writings" contains some of Algren's earliest short stories, as well as the last two he wrote before his death in 1981. The centerpiece of the collection is Algren's unfinished novel, "Entrapment." Based on the life of his friend Margo, a heroin addict and prostitute, the novel demonstrates some of his finest and most provocative writing. Nelson Algren (1909-1981) wrote of the despised urban underbelly of America before it was fashionable to do so, and he still stands as one of our most defiant and enduring novelists. His novels include "The Man with the Golden Arm," winner of the first National Book Award; "A Walk on the Wild Side"; and "Never Come Morning." Editor Brooke Horvath is the author of "Understanding Nelson Algren." A poet as well, Horvath is a professor of English at Kent State University.

This collection of Nelson Algren's travel writings documents his journeys through the seamier sides of great American cities and the international social and political landscapes of the mid-1960s." Notes from a Sea Diary" offers one of the most remarkable appraisals of Ernest Hemingway ever written. Aboard the freighter "Malayasia Mail," Algren ponders his personal encounter with Hemingway in Cuba, and the values inherent in Hemingway's stories, as he visits the ports of Pusan, Kowloon, Bombay, and Calcutta." Who Lost an American?" is a whirlwind spin through Paris and playboy clubs, New York publishing and Dublin pubs, Crete, and Chicago as Algren adventures with Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Brendan Behan, and Juliette Greco. Nelson Algren (1909-1981) wrote of the despised urban underbelly of America before it was fashionable to do so, and still stands as one of our most defiant and enduring novelists. His novels include "The Man with the Golden Arm," winner of the first National Book Award, "A Walk on the Wild Side," and "Never Come Morning."

With an introduction by Richard FlanaganDove Findhorn is a naïve country boy who busts out of Hicksville, Texas in pursuit of a better life in New Orleans. Amongst the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers and hustlers of the old French Quarter, Dove finds only hopelessness, crime and despair. His quest uncovers a harrowing grotesque of the American Dream. A Walk in the Wild Side is an angry, lonely, large-hearted and often funny masterpiece that has captured the imaginations of every generation since its first publication in 1956, and that rendered a world later immortalised in Lou Reed´s classic song.

"This is a man writing and you should not read it if you cannot take a punch. . . . Mr. Algren, boy, you are good."--Ernest Hemingway "Algren is an artist whose sympathy is as large as Victor Hugo's, an artist who ranks . . . among our best American authors."--"Chicago Sun-Times" ""The Devil's Stocking" is clearly vintage Algren. . . . He] seems not to have aged but only matured and to be, as never before, in firm possession of his subject. His language throughout the novel is precise, controlled, almost entirely free of the lush lyrical excesses of the past, but nonetheless genuinely warm and alive. The story is recognizable as belonging in the classic Algren repertoire, yet is also freshly conceived and carried forward with an easy assurance that indicates Algren had it in him to write five or six more novels in the same vein."--"The New York Times Book Review" "The Devil's Stocking" is the story of Ruby Calhoun, a boxer accused of murder in a shadowy world of low-purse fighters, cops, con artists, and bar girls. Chronicling a battle for truth and human dignity that gives way to a larger story of life-and-death decisions, literary grandmaster Nelson Algren's last novel is a fitting capstone to a long and brilliant career. Nelson Algren (1909-1981) wrote of the despised urban underbelly of America before it was fashionable to do so and still stands as one of our most defiant and enduring novelists. His novels include "The Man with the Golden Arm" (winner of the first National Book Award), "A Walk on the Wild Side," and "Never Come Morning."

Critical essays accompany the story of gambler Frankie Machine as he struggles to stay alive amid the corruption and drug addiction of Chicago's slums and underworld.

The first recipient of the National Book Award presents a haunting yet lyrical portrait of 1930s New Orleans, complete with the hustlers, bootleggers, and prostitutes that frequented Perdido Street in the French Quarter. Reprint.

Reprint of the ed. published by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, New York.