Algren
A Life
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Chicago Writers Association Nonfiction Book of the Year (2017)
Society of Midland Authors Literary Award in Biography (2017)
A tireless champion of the downtrodden, Nelson Algren, one of the most celebrated writers of the 20th century, lived an outsider's life himself. He spent a month in prison as a young man for the theft of a typewriter; his involvement in Marxist groups earned him a lengthy FBI dossier; and he spent much of his life palling around with the sorts of drug addicts, prostitutes, and poor laborers who inspired and populated his novels and short stories.
Most today know Algren as the radical, womanizing writer of The Man with the Golden Arm, which won the first National Book Award, in 1950, but award-winning reporter Mary Wisniewski offers a deeper portrait. Starting with his childhood in the City of Big Shoulders, Algren sheds new light on the writer's most momentous periods, from his on-again-off-again work for the WPA to his stint as an uninspired soldier in World War II to his long-distance affair with his most famous lover, Simone de Beauvoir, to the sense of community and acceptance Algren found in the artist colony of Sag Harbor before his death in 1981.
Wisniewski interviewed dozens of Algren's closest friends and inner circle, including photographer Art Shay and author and historian Studs Terkel, and tracked down much of his unpublished writing and correspondence. She unearths new details about the writer's life, work, personality, and habits and reveals a funny, sensitive, and romantic but sometimes exasperating, insecure, and self-destructive artist.
The first new biography of Algren in over 25 years, this fresh look at the man whose unique style and compassionate message enchanted readers and fellow writers and whose boyish charm seduced many women is indispensable to anyone interested in 20-century American literature and history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With this comprehensive biography, Wisniewski, award-winning journalist for the Chicago Tribune, has done sterling work toward restoring Nelson Algren (1909 1981) to his position of prominence as a celebrated author. Ably relating Algren's life to his work; Wisniewski looks at how Algren's writing process changed over the years, and how his books took shape through introspection and painstaking revision. Algren was famously a Chicago writer, and Wisniewski reveals a man who drew from his environment, from early childhood to his years living in a Polish-American neighborhood on Chicago's Northwest Side. At home with prostitutes and ne'er-do-wells, Algren developed an edgy, gritty style of writing that was apparent as early as his debut, Somebody in Boots, and carried through to his acclaimed later novels, The Man with the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side. If that paints one picture of the man, readers will also see another in his lifelong affair with Simone de Beauvoir. Wisniewski takes the reader through the life of a complex man as emblematic of Chicago as Carl Sandburg was, and puts him back where he belongs: not just in Chicago, but in American literature.
