Nelson Algren, the author of two of the seminal works of post-World War
II American letters ("The Man With the Golden Arm" and "A Walk on the
Wild Side") was born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham on March 28, 1909 in
Detroit, Michigan, into a Jewish family. His paternal grandfather, who
was on Scandinavian extraction, had converted to Judaism on his own
volition, and then married a Jewish woman, as had his half-Jewish
father. Nelson had an older sister, Bernice.
His family's roots were in Chicago, Carl Sandburg's "City of Broad
Shoulders", and in Black Oak, Indiana, where his grandparents owned a
trading post, and in 1913, his parents moved back to Chicago, settling
into what was then an Irish neighborhood on the South Side. The future
writer attended the neighborhood public schools. Chicago would become
his muse and be the real subject of his all his major works,a major
character in his oeuvre just as it was for the writer James T. Farrell in his
Studs Lonigan trilogy.
The family subsequently relocated to the Chicago's Northwest Side,
where his father went into business with a tire and battery shop. The
young Nelson attended Hibbard High School and roamed his neighborhood,
playing pool and beginning his obsession with gambling that would
continue throughout his life. After graduating from high school in
1927, he attended the University of Illinois, majoring in studying
sociology. The subject was congruent with his fascination with the
lower class people and culture of Chicago's ethnic neighborhoods. He
often spent times in the Polish neighborhoods east and south of his own
neighborhood.
After graduation from college in 1931, he hitchhiked through the
Midwest in order to find a job as a journalist. During those opening
years of the Great Depression, while Herbert Hoover was still president, jobs
were scare. Algren worked briefly at a Y.M.C.A. in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, before returning to Chicago, but he hit the road again that
autumn. Traveling south with only the Mississippi River as his pilot,
Algren wound up in New Orleans, where he was struck by the great amount
of poverty in the Crescent City. Algren remained in New Orleans,
working as a door-to-door salesman for a coffee company and a pharmacy,
before using his savings to hit the road again in 1932.
In South Texas, Algren earned his living as a fruit picker. Striking
out as an entrepreneur, he tried to renovate a gas station (the
location will be fictionalized over 20 years later in "A Walk on the
Wildside"), but the venture was both boring and unprofitable, so like
his future character Dove Linkhorn, he began again to wander. He
journeyed throughout Texas, Oklahoma and Mexico.
At the end of 1932, Algren moved back to Chicago where he joined the
left-wing John Reed Club (named after the American Communist buried in
the Kremlin who wrote the book about the 1917 Russian Revolution "Ten
Days That Shook the World", and the subject of the movie Ein Mann kämpft für Gerechtigkeit (1981). His
active membership in the group allowed him to befriend Richard Wright, who
would later borrow the original title of Algren's first novel "Somebody
in Boots" for his own classic "Native Son".
Algren hit the road again in 1933, traveling to Texas where he drifted
through San Antonio, El Paso, and El Paso's border-town of Juarez,
Mexico before settling in Alpine, Texas. Upon leaving Alpine, Nelson
attempted to steal one of the typewriters from the local business
college and was arrested. In a surprisingly long trial, Algren's lawyer
defends on the common law principle that he, as a writer, is allowed
the tools of his trade. Found guilty, he was sentenced to two years of
punishment with the proviso he could serve the sentence wherever he
wanted to. It was clearly time to leave Texas, though he would write of
Texas in his first novel, "Somebody in Boots" and in his fourth, "A
Walk on the Wildside" (1956) and in multiple short stories.
Back in Chicago by June 1934, Algren established himself as a member of
a literary circle that met on Rush Street in the North Side. It was
during this period that he wrote his first published novel, "Somebody
in Boots", which received poor reviews when it was published in March
1935. The bad reviews and a poor relationship with his girlfriend led
to a suicide attempt, and he received mental health care at the
University of Chicago Psychiatric Center.
After recovering his mental equilibrium, he and his girlfriend Amanda
moved to a small apartment on the South Side of Chicago. Algren was
taken on by the Federal Writers' Project, part of the Works Progress
Administration that sought to put people back to work in their areas of
expertise. During frequently visits to East St. Louis, Illinois, he
befriended prostitutes and junkies, the kinds of people who would
become the characters in his novels and short-stories.
In a fateful decision, Algren and Amanda moved in May 1940 to the
neighborhood at Milwaukee and Division Street, Chicago's so-called
Polish Triangle. As the clouds of war moved closer to the United
States, Algren's father and sister Bernice died, and their passing and
the Polish-Americans of his new neighborhood inspired his second novel,
"Never Come Morning". Though the book received good reviews, the city
of Chicago banned it from its public libraries due to it potentially
offending the city's denizens of Czech and Polish extraction, who have
seen their native countries devoured by the Nazis. In fact, due to his
pen name "Algren", the writer is attacked for being pro-Nazi, as -- in
a case of reverse racism -- anyone of Scandinavian stock would be so
inclined. In truth, Algren is not a fascist, or a racist; he has tried
to tell the truth, and as his later friend Kurt Vonnegut would say
after his death, he knew that the poor were not the saints that
sentimental writers tried to portray them, as in neo-late-Tolstoy
writing. The poor and disenfranchised who were his subject were, in
reality, frequently mean-spirited and ignorant. It was his lack of a
balancing "normative" character to redeem the others in his tales, by
promising hope and a brighter future, that opened him up to charges of
being mean-spirited himself.
The 34-year old Algren was drafted into the Army in November 1943 (the
draft effected all males age 18-44, as enlistments had dropped off
precariously after the initial six months of the war and a military
that would encompass 16 million souls before the VJ-Day was in the
process of being built). Ironically, he was shipped back to Texas for
infantry training, and in the spring of 1944, he was shipped on to
Europe as part of the vast reserve of troops needed to bolster the
upcoming invasion of Normandy. Algren, who was designated a litter
bearer, never made rank, and despite being a college graduate, was
never considered as a candidate for a commission, likely due to his
left-wing political beliefs. While in liberated France, Algren quite
naturally became involved in the demimonde, attempting to set himself
up as a black marketeer. He was not a noted success.
Algren returned to Chicago in November 1945 after being demobilized,
moving into another Polish neighborhood, this one located at Wabansia
and Bosworth. (Towards the end of his life, Algren -- still living in
poor neighborhoods -- said he felt comfortable among people who were on
welfare.) Algren's life primarily was involved in reading and writing
short-stories, and the translation of his work into French brought him
into contact with the woman who would be the great love of his life --
and his greatest frustration -- the great French feminist intellectual
Simone de Beauvoir. It was an unusual coupling as Beauvoir, descended from the
Parisian haute-bourgeoisie and the "mother" of modern, post-War
feminism, would visit Algren in his Chicago semi-slum and visited the
dives filled with hookers, pimps, drunks, drug-addicts and thieves with
him, then writing him letters from France pledging her fealty as a
submissive woman. Unfortauntely for Algren, though Beauvoir loved him
and was fulfilled by him sexually, her soul rather than her heart
belonged to her paramour and partner, 'Jean Paul Satre. After many
years of association, he would say around 1970 that the two
Existentialist philosophers were less honest.
Before this epiphany, Algren moved into the Brevoort Hotel in New
York's Greenwich Village with her at her urging, in April 1947.
However, their new living arrangement could not last, as Algren needed
Chicago and Beavoir needed Paris -- and Sartre. She and Sartre had an
open relationship, and Algren visited her in Paris. Fired with energy
from his new Muse, Algren immersed intensely in his writing and
produced his masterpiece in 1948, "The Man With the Golden Arm", a
novel about an illicit card-dealer, Frankie the Machine, who is a
morphine junkie with an (allegedly) crippled wife in love with another
woman and trying to stay clean in a bad, bad world that had no sympathy
for junkies, pushers or anyone else, for that matter.
Algren had wanted to entitle his dark novel "Night Without Mercy," but
his publisher, Doubleday, convinced him to use the title that graces
the now classic novel. Published by Doubleday in November 1949, the
novel won the first National Book Award in 1950. One of the seminal
novels of post-World War II American letters, "The Man with the Golden
Arm" is Algren's greatest and most enduring work. With its publication,
and book award handed to him by Eleanor Roosevelt, Algren had reached the zenith
of his craft.
Unfortunately, he would never again reach those heights, publishing
only one more major novel, "A Walk on the Wild Side", seven years after
"Golden Arm". It seems that Algren never really got over the failure of
his relationship with Beauvoir (who featured him as a main character in
her own 1957 novel, "The Mandarins", in which he is "Lewis Brogan").
"Wild Side", which in many ways was a rehash of "Somebody in Boots" and
several short stories, did not receive a great critical reception,
though it sold well. The recycling of earlier material may indicate
Algren was suffering from a writer's block. As it were, he never again
produced a major novel, though he continued writing until the end of
his life.
Nelson Algren died of a heart-attack on May 9, 1981, secure in his
reputation of having written one, if not two, of the great post-War
novels. He was 72 years old.
