Nelson Algren - Nelson Algren Award, Bibliography

Writer, born in Detroit, Michigan, USA. He trained as a journalist after a childhood in the Chicago slums. After working at a variety of jobs during the Depression, he settled in Chicago and became a leading exponent of the Chicago school of realism. His five streetwise novels include The Man With the Golden Arm (1949, National Book Award) and A Walk on the Wild Side (1956). After 1956 he wrote mostly stories and essays, producing only one novel (1981). In later years he became known for having had an affair with the French intellectual and writer, Simone de Beauvoir.

Nelson Algren (March 28, 1909 - May 9, 1981) was a legendary American writer.

Born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham in Detroit, Michigan, Algren moved to Chicago, Illinois, with his parents at the age of three to live in a working-class, immigrant neighborhood on the South Side. When Algren was eight years old, his parents moved from 7139 S.

Algren was educated in Chicago's public schools, graduated from Hibbard High School (now Roosevelt), and went on to study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in journalism during the Great Depression in 1931.

His first novel, Somebody in Boots, was published in 1935. There is conjecture that this may have been due to suspicion regarding Algren's political beliefs.

He articulated the world of "drunks, pimps, prostitutes, freaks, drug addicts, prize fighters, corrupt politicians, and hoodlums". Nonconformity, published in 1994, presents Algren's side of the debacle that was the 1956 film adaptation of "Golden Arm." Nonconformity also expresses the belief system behind Algren's writing, not to mention a call to writers everywhere to investigate the dark and represent the ignored.

Algren had a torrid affair with Simone de Beauvoir and they travelled to Latin America together in 1949. In her novel The Mandarins (1957), she wrote of Algren (who is "Lewis Brogan" in the book):

"At first I found it amusing meeting in the flesh that classic American species: self-made leftist writer.

According to Herbert Mitgang, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation did not like Algren's political views and kept a dossier on him amounting to more than 500 pages, but identified nothing concretely subversive. 1988.)

It is generally accepted that Algren wrote best about his beloved Chicago.

In the 2001 documentary Classic Albums: Lou Reed: Transformer, musician Lou Reed says that Algren's 1956 novel, A Walk on the Wild Side, was the launching point for his song, "Walk on the Wild Side". Furthermore, the Minnesota based punk-rock band Dillinger Four quotes Algren as an inspiration in the song "Doublewhiskeycokenoice" by singing: "Nelson Algren came to me and said, 'Celebrate the ugly things' / The beat-up side of what they call pride could be the measure of these days". The 2002 album "Adult World" by guitarist Wayne Kramer (founding member of the Detroit band MC5) contains a song entitled "Nelson Algren Stopped By", in which guest band X-Mars-X provides a shuffling jazz background while Kramer reads a prose poem about walking the streets of present-day Chicago with Algren.

Nelson Algren Award

Each year the Chicago Tribune newspaper gives a Nelson Algren award for short fiction. The award is viewed with more than a little irony by Algren admirers; the Tribune panned Algren's work in his lifetime, referring to Chicago, City on the Make as a "highly scented object." In an afterword to that book, Algren accused the Tribune of imposing false viewpoints on the city and promoting mediocrity.

"I don't recommend being a bachelor, but it helps if you want to write."

"(Chicago is) the only major city in the country where you can easily buy your way out of a murder rap."

Bibliography

Somebody in Boots (1935) Never Come Morning (1942) The Neon Wilderness (1947), a collection of short stories The Man With the Golden Arm (1949), concerns morphine addiction Chicago, City on the Make (1951) A Walk on the Wild Side (1956) Nelson Algren's Own Book of Lonesome Monsters (1962) Who Lost an American? (1963) Conversations with Nelson Algren (1964) Notes from a Sea Diary: Hemingway All the Way (1965) The Last Carousel (1973) The Devil's Stocking (1983) America Eats (1992) He Swung and He Missed (1993) Nonconformity (1994) The Texas Stories of Nelson Algren (1994)