Algren

September 12, 2016
With this comprehensive biography, Wisniewski, award-winning journalist for the Chicago Tribune, has done sterling work toward restoring Nelson Algren (1909â1981) 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.

Since it's been 25 years since the only comprehensive biography of Nelson Algren (1909-1981), this discerning book is welcome.Wisniewski, a longtime Chicago reporter, knows Algren's home turf well. As a teenager, he was already "on the outside," enamored with the South Side's "neighborhood pool sharks, gamblers, bootleggers, and sandlot baseball stars." Although a poor student in high school, he graduated from college in 1931 with a degree in journalism. Next came hitching and riding boxcars across Depression-era America, meeting the down and out and acquiring a taste for gambling that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Algren wasn't a born writer, but with hard work and great effort, he became one. His good friend Kurt Vonnegut said he was "enchanted by the hopeless, could not take his eyes off them." The sale of an early story about robbery and murder to a magazine for $25 helped him secure a contract for his first novel. The New York Sun described his leftist, proletarian Somebody in Boots as a novel that "does not shrink from the harsh facts of violence, rape and human wretchedness." The Works Progress Administration provided some much-needed income after his marriage in 1938, and he flirted with communism. Richard Wright helped him find a home for his next novel, Never Come Morning, which Hemingway called "good stuff." Back home after a stint in the Army, Nelson started a lengthy, romantic relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. Wisniewski calls it "ridiculous, exotic, corny, impossible...and amazing." They inspired each other. Nelson's The Man with the Golden Arm, about drug addiction, was a "hit," and Otto Preminger's popular film version came out in 1955 (for which Algren was paid little). A Walk on the Wild Side, which he felt was his best book, came out a year later. When the impoverished author died in 1981, all his work was out of print. It's good to have the irascible, bohemian chronicler of the streets back via this top-notch biography. "In backpacks across America, Algren still lives." COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

October 1, 2016

Nelson Algren (1909-81), born in Detroit, spent his formative and creative years in Chicago and is remembered for two novels of social realism: The Man with the Golden Arm, adapted for the screen with Frank Sinatra playing a heroin-addicted card dealer; and A Walk on the Wild Side, evoking the outcast world of New Orleans pimps, pushers, and prostitutes (appropriated for a song title by Lou Reed). Wisniewski, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, relates Algren's life story in a straightforward journalistic style, chronicling his Jewish-Swedish roots, his early and later short stories and novels, his brief but intense romance with existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (she was buried wearing his ring), and his troubled relationships with women and fellow writers, though Richard Wright was an exception. When Algren's first novel, originally titled Native Son, was changed to Somebody in Boots, he bequeathed the title to Wright for his novel. VERDICT Recommended for general readers; for a more academic account, with additional sociohistorical background, see Bettina Drew's Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side.--Lonnie Weatherby, McGill Univ. Lib., Montreal

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 1, 2016
To tell the story of writer Nelson Algren's baffling temperament, up-and-down life, and underappreciated work, a biographer needs to know Chicago, and city native and Chicago Tribune reporter Wisniewski has impeccable bona fides. Her descriptions of the struggling neighborhoods that shaped Algren's piercing perception of the inequities of the world and inspired him to grapple with life's grimmest aspects in his fiction are at once viscerally immediate and historically informed. Chicago's Polish American community wanted his gritty novel, Never Come Morning (1942), banned from Chicago Public Library, opposition that only hardened his convictions. Seven years later, Algren triumphantly won the first-ever National Book Award for fiction for The Man with the Golden Arm (1949). By turns depressed, arrogant, and reckless, this habitual gambler married the same woman twice, drew the suspicious attention of the FBI, floundered in his now famous love affair with the revolutionary French feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir, lost his stake in the movie version of his best novel, and saw his dark lyricism dismissed as lurid. In the first Algren biography in more than two decades, Wisniewski reintroduces with fresh insight this signature American writer who in his streetwise novels offers love as a golden thread leading out of hell, if only one can hang on to it. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)