In 1978, the newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin had this to say about Nelson Algren: “He should be a wealthy man. Fifty years from now, he will be studied in schools as perhaps one-two-three in his time, and a student will wonder how this man lived with all his riches.”
It’s 41 years later, and the clock’s ticking. Nelson Algren hasn’t vanished, to be sure. His name still resonates in his longtime hometown of Chicago, which has made him part of its mythos and named a street after him, part of the city’s funny habit of embracing its harshest critics (cf. Carl Sandburg, Richard Wright, Mike Royko). But the fiction at the core of Algren’s oeuvre hasn’t aged well: Polemical in his early period and cynical in his late one, his fiction was often overwritten, sentimental, and messily plotted. There is no shortage of interviews with novelists listing offbeat inspirations these days, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a writer who dreams of being Algren.
For all his flaws, though, Algren’s ghostly presence in America’s literary landscape is lamentable: He helped create and agitated for a brand of working-class fiction that today rarely rises to critical attention, let alone the bestseller list. In his fine Algren biography, Never A Lovely So Real, Colin Asher makes a strong case for Algren’s enduring value as a social critic, if not a social novelist, and lays out proof that candor will always be seen as a threat by authorities. The Chicago whose underbelly he explored in his fiction, Asher writes, “was a perfect synecdoche for the country — a place so in love with the idea of its virtue that it was willing to disavow, in the name of the common good, anyone who failed to meet its narrow and exacting standards.”
Algren arrived at that love-hate relationship through hard experience. The descendent of poor Jewish stock — his father ran a garage but was bad at business, forever taken and ripped off, and his mother a bitter harridan — Algren was college-educated but had the bad luck of entering the workforce as the Great Depression had fixed its jaws on the country. In possession of a useless journalism degree, he rode the rails, patched together odd jobs (for a dismal moment he pursued a scheme to run a gas station in rural Texas), and wrote. Among the Communist-affiliated publications of the 30s, along with the Works Progress Administration, he found a community that motivated him to write his first novel, 1935’s Somebody in Boots, the story of a hard traveler like Algren himself, on his path to discovering that the city is “a whore, selling a tin souvenir.”
That somebody so embittered about American society, and so shaky on his feet — Asher notes multiple cases of suicidal depression — would rise to mass sales and critical acclaim is one of the most remarkable success stories in American literature. He was a talent who’d found his moment in the Depression — Malcolm Cowley placed him in a “Chicago School” pantheon that included Algren’s friend Richard Wright, Carl Sandburg, and James T. Farrell. His two-fisted prose garnered a following that attracted Simone de Beauvoir, with whom he had an extended affair. With 1949’s The Man With the Golden Arm, winner of the first National Book Award, he’d helped satisfy the post-war generation’s boundless appetite for noir, borne of the rightful suspicion that all wasn’t well despite winning the war, and matched it with a social realism that allowed readers to play tourist in poker rooms, jazz clubs, and shooting galleries. His characters “no longer felt they had been born in America. They felt they had merely emerged from the wrong side of the billboards.”
Sales spiked, though not Algren’s pocketbook; through the vicissitudes of the publishing industry at the time, a paperback edition of Somebody in Boots sold a million copies, yet Algren only received $1,000 for it. And the likes of Ernest Hemingway thought the world of him: In his personal copy of Arm, he wrote, “OK, kid, you beat Dostoyevsky. I’ll never fight you in Chicago. Ever.”
Yet Algren lived with a constant sense that he was being sidelined from opportunities for speaking so harshly of the American experience. It was a justified paranoia — just as his being Jewish kept him from advancing in the Army during the war, his Communist past caught the attention of the FBI, which monitored him and restricted his travel during his post-Arm heyday. Asher is Algren’s first biographer to gain access to an all but completely unredacted FBI file on Algren, and it reveals an ongoing effort to trap him into perjury, bullying publishers into slowing the release of his 1956 novel, A Walk on the Wild Side, and killing his book-length essay Nonconformity. The FBI file doesn’t overwhelm Asher’s story, but it guides its sensibility; Never A Lovely So Real is a critical biography, but less of Algren’s output than of the culture he lived in. Asher suggests, not unfairly, that Algren would have been more of a towering figure in American letters were critical tastes not so aggressively booshwa after World War II, or if the feds found bigger fish to fry.
The tradeoff for this line of argument is that it’s not much of a defense of his prose. As an advocate for Algren’s fiction, Asher can be as disappointing a salesman as Algren’s father was a mechanic — his discussions of the novels themselves are mainly extended plot summaries that make Algren’s characters seem like flotsam on a turgid river, followed by sketches of the critical reception they received. Those reviews were increasingly distant as the years went on. Time praised Arm as “a true novelist’s triumph” but six years later the New York Times found A Walk on the Wild Side paralyzed by a “puerile sentimentality”; Leslie Fiedler deemed him a “museum piece — the last of the proletarian writers.”
Before his death in 1981, Algren enjoyed some success as a literary eminence, teaching in the Iowa Writers Workshop, mentoring young working-class writers like Russell Banks, and eagerly pursuing a nonfiction book about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a boxer wrongly accused of homicide, later turning the story into his posthumous 1983 novel, The Devil’s Stocking. When he moved from Chicago to Paterson, New Jersey in 1975 to better cover Carter’s story, the Chicago papers flooded the zone to cover his departure as if war had been declared. Yet “museum piece” isn’t wrong, and Asher’s story in the latter chapters is of a writer who was forever stifled — in romance, in the public square, as a novelist eager to go 12 rounds with Dostoyevsky. Not a victim — Algren was too strong-willed for victimhood. But a writer who perhaps lived too much with life’s unfairness.
The two books I love most by Algren distill that feeling to its purest essence and somehow make it sing. Neither are fiction; both were censored and spiked in their own time. One, 1951’s Chicago: City on the Make, is a prose poem originally commissioned by Holiday magazine following his Arm fame; Holiday‘s editors sanded down its rough edges, but the book itself is at once soaring and street-level, making two things out of the city’s contradictory nature rather than one place short-circuited by its contradictions. “Kansas City has gone as far as it can go. San Francisco is complete. Philadelphia appears finished,” he wrote. “But Hustlertown keeps spreading itself all over the prairie grass, always wider and whiter.” Encompassing music, politics, baseball, wealth, and poverty, it is the tribute to the city that generations of writers have tried to imitate ever since.
The second book, Nonconformity, was so radioactive in the HUAC era that Algren’s publisher refused to release it in 1953; it finally emerged in 1996. “This will be one of the first books they will burn,” a friend wrote him after reading a manuscript. “Congratulations.” In its moment it might have resounded as a clarion call for a generation of writers, laying waste to capitalism’s veneer of respectability in one swipe: “Behind Business’s billboards and Business’s headlines and Business’s pulpits and Business’s arsenals, behind the car ads and the subtitles and the commercials, the people of Dickens and Dostoevsky yet endure,” he wrote.
One mustn’t judge a book by its cover, but it’s hard to ignore the absence of Algren’s name on the cover of Never A Lovely So Real. So is Algren’s face. Instead there’s a black-and-white midcentury photo of downtown Chicago, the title laid over it in a muscular font. It says “Algren,” in its way. Yet it also implies so much of what he fought against, at his best in those gemlike essay books — he cared more about what was going on under the L than the edifices that towered above it. I want a poster of the cover, and feel bad for wanting it. Because what does that suggest about Algren’s reputation, and how different it was from what he believed, what he wrote? What would it take to create culture where the selling point on the cover would be not a gorgeous line of his, or the gorgeous city whose facade he mocked, but his own name?
[Published April 16, 2018 by W.W. Norton and Company. 544 pages, $39.95 hardcover]