Conversations with Nelson Algren

Conversations with Nelson Algren PDF Author: H. E. F. Donohue
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226013831
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
In these frank and often devastating conversations Nelson Algren reveals himself with all the gruff humor, deflating insight, honesty, and critical brilliance that marked his career. Prodded by H. E. F. Donohue, Algren discusses everything from his childhood to his compulsion to write to his relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. The result is a masterful portrait of a rebel and a major American writer.

Conversations with Nelson Algren

Conversations with Nelson Algren PDF Author: H. E. F. Donohue
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226013831
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
In these frank and often devastating conversations Nelson Algren reveals himself with all the gruff humor, deflating insight, honesty, and critical brilliance that marked his career. Prodded by H. E. F. Donohue, Algren discusses everything from his childhood to his compulsion to write to his relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. The result is a masterful portrait of a rebel and a major American writer.

Chicago, City on the Make

Chicago, City on the Make PDF Author: Nelson Algren
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780226013848
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 106

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Book Description
Presents Algren's irreverent portrait of Chicago--the hustlers' town--which records the character and lifestyles of the Windy City from pioneer days through Prohibition and the reign of Richard Daley

A Walk on the Wild Side

A Walk on the Wild Side PDF Author: Nelson Algren
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780374525323
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
With its depiction of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, "A Walk on the Wild Side" tells, in Algren's own words, "something about the natural toughness of women and men, in that order".

Never a Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren

Never a Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren PDF Author: Colin Asher
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393244520
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
This definitive biography reclaims Nelson Algren as a towering literary figure and finally unravels the enigma of his disappearance from American letters. For a time, Nelson Algren was America’s most famous author, lauded by the likes of Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway. Millions bought his books. Algren’s third novel, The Man with the Golden Arm, won the first National Book Award, and Frank Sinatra starred in the movie. But despite Algren’s talent, he abandoned fiction and fell into obscurity. The cause of his decline was never clear. Some said he drank his talent away; others cited writer’s block. The truth, hidden in the pages of his books, is far more complicated and tragic. Now, almost forty years after Algren’s death, Colin Asher finally captures the full, novelistic story of his life in a magisterial biography set against mid-twentieth-century American politics and culture. Drawing from interviews, archival correspondence, and the most complete version of Algren’s 886-page FBI file ever released, Colin Asher portrays Algren as a dramatic iconoclast. A member of the Communist Party in the 1930s, Algren used his writing to humanize Chicago’s underclass, while excoriating the conservative radicalism of the McCarthy era. Asher traces Algren’s development as a thinker, his close friendship and falling out with Richard Wright, and his famous affair with Simone de Beauvoir. Most intriguingly, Asher uncovers the true cause of Algren’s artistic exile: a reckless creative decision that led to increased FBI scrutiny and may have caused a mental breakdown. In his second act, Algren was a vexing figure who hid behind a cynical facade. He called himself a “journalist” and a “loser,” though many still considered him one of the greatest living American authors. An inspiration to writers such as Hunter S. Thompson, Martha Gellhorn, Jimmy Breslin, Betty Friedan, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Russell Banks, and Thomas Pynchon, Algren nevertheless struggled to achieve recognition, and died just as his career was on the verge of experiencing a renaissance. Never a Lovely So Real offers an exquisitely detailed, engrossing portrait of a master who, as esteemed literary critic Maxwell Geismar wrote, was capable of suggesting “the whole contour of a human life in a few terse pages.”

Chicago

Chicago PDF Author: Nelson Algren
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780226013862
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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.

The Man with the Golden Arm

The Man with the Golden Arm PDF Author: Nelson Algren
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Chicago (Ill.)
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
A novel about a young drug addict and his daily encounters as he pursues his eternal quest for means to support his habit.

Nelson Algren

Nelson Algren PDF Author: Robert Ward
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838641088
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
This collection of eleven essays on Algren's major work offers a diverse and lively range of theoretical and historical readings. These include discussions of Algren's place in Chicago's left-wing literary tradition, the aesthetic of American and European naturalism, and his reaction to, and reception in, the Cold War milieu of the 1940s and 1950s. Consideration is also given to the ways in which paperback cover designs shaped the reception of Algren's novels as pulp fiction. Algren's works are further illuminated by the theories of Walter Benjamin, and those associated with confinement, autobiography, post-colonialism, and the cultural politics of American carnival. The volume is supplemented by a piece that traces the birth and growth of the Algren archive at Ohio State University. Robert Ward lectures in American Literature at St. Martin's College, Lancaster.

The Devil's Stocking

The Devil's Stocking PDF Author: Nelson Algren
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1609802055
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
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 which 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.

The Last Carousel

The Last Carousel PDF Author: Nelson Algren
Publisher: Penguin Adult HC/TR
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
Short stories from a classic Chicago writer, featuring a colorful gallery of bums, beats, jocks, clowns, and smart alecks.

Entrapment and Other Writings

Entrapment and Other Writings PDF Author: Nelson Algren
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1583228683
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Nelson Algren sought humanity in the urban wilderness of postwar America, where his powerful voice rose from behind the billboards and down tin-can alleys, from among the marginalized and ignored, the outcasts and scapegoats, the punks and junkies, the whores and down-on-their luck gamblers, the punch-drunk boxers and skid-row drunkies and kids who knew they'd never reach the age of twenty-one: all of them admirable in Algren’s eyes for their vitality and no-bullshit forthrightness, their insistence on living and their ability to find a laugh and a dream in the unlikeliest places. In Entrapment and Other Writings—containing his unfinished novel and previously unpublished or uncollected stories, poems, and essays—Algren speaks to our time as few of his fellow great American writers of the 1940s and ’50s do, in part because he hasn’t yet been accepted and assimilated into the American literary canon despite that he is held up as a talismanic figure. "You should not read [Algren] if you can’t take a punch," Ernest Hemingway declared. "Mr. Algren can hit with both hands and move around and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful."