Algren, Nelson

Average customer rating:

Not exactly an uplifting read
One of my favorites
Walking the Walk
Algren's most polished work.
A Neglected Classic

A Walk on the Wild Side: A Novel
Nelson Algren
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Similar Items:

The Man with the Golden Arm
The Neon Wilderness
Chicago: City on the Make: 50th Anniversary Edition, Newly Annotated
Never Come Morning
Nonconformity: Writing on Writing

ASIN: 0374525323

Book Description

With its depictions of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, A Walk in the Wild Side has found a place in the imaginations of all generations since it first appeared. As Algren admitted, the book "wasn't written until long after it had been walked . . . I found my way to the streets on the other side of the Southern Pacific station, where the big jukes were singing something called 'Walking the Wild Side of Life.' I've stayed pretty much on that side of the curb ever since."

Perhaps the author's own words describe this classic work best: "The book asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives. Why men who have suffered at the hands of other men are the natural believers in humanity, while those whose part has been simply to acquire, to take all and give nothing, are the most contemptuous of mankind."

Customer Reviews:

Not exactly an uplifting read.......2003-07-03

I've read this book twice now. First in college for a literature class, and again 8 years later. Both times it depressed me. Granted, that is the book's purpose. To provide a realistic and tragic glimpse into the lives of some of America's least fortunate during the depression. Though it is interesting and well written, I can't say that I would tell my best friend to read it.

One of my favorites.......2002-12-22

This book is about people who have nothing to lose, so they can afford to take chances.

It's funny, sad and provocative. Yes, I know that some parts have been lifted from "Neon Wilderness" but it works for me.

My advice to anyone who's read the book but not seen the movie that's "supposedly" based on this book: DON'T.

You will be disappointed. The story is not the same. It's so different from Algren's book that Algren himself didn't even attend the premiere.

If you haven't read this book and are a fan of stories about marganalized people, then by all means, read it.

It shows the "downtrodden" as complex and real people.

Walking the Walk.......2000-12-15

Don't be misled by the title. A walk on the wild side? Sounds like fun, hey? Well, you can walk the walk, but you can't go home again, or if you do, you may be a little the worse for wear. Algren is a poet of pain. Highly recommended.

Algren's most polished work........2000-11-11

Country boy Dove Linkhorn, son of Fitz ( hell-fire preacher and cesspool cleaner ),defiler of women, smarter than he looks bum, leaves Texas for New Orleans where he fits right in for a while, with the depression-era cripples, prostitutes, pimps, flimflam artists,and prison-life.

Much of this book is a re-run of Somebody in Boots and Never Come Morning, with modifications. Unlike those books, the prose style is Algren at his most polished. Even so he overdoes it on many occasions where a simple statement would have sufficed. But redeems himself by pretty much avoiding the annoying switch in viewpoint within multiple character scenes that mar his other, otherwise excellent work.

Nelson Algren didn't write all that many books in his long career, a state of affairs that could be condensed into two titles: A Walk on the Wild Side and The Man with the Golden Arm.

A Neglected Classic.......2000-01-08

In a perfect world, _A Walk on the Wild Side_ would be remembered as Algren's best book, and would be read in American literature classes.

Algren is a much-needed antidote to both romantics who idealize the poor and to conservatives who feel smugly superior to the lower classes but have no real sense of the difficulties they face.

Its social significance aside, _Walk_ should be read by anyone interested in literary style. Algren's narrative voice--pugnacious, amused, and quietly outraged--explains why Algren has always been read by writers, even if a larger general audience continues to escape him.

(While it is true this novel reworks material from _The Neon Wilderness_, it is put to much better use here--read _Walk_ first!)

Never Come Morning
Average customer rating:

Gritty americana from a forgotten master

Gritty, but hollow novel about a thug and his life..

Catcher In The Rye for the rest of us

Dark and gritty. A work of transition.

A seriously under-rated author's most under-rated novel

Never Come Morning
Nelson Algren , and Jr., Kurt Vonnegut
Manufacturer: Seven Stories Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Similar Items:

The Neon Wilderness

The Man with the Golden Arm

A Walk on the Wild Side: A Novel

Chicago: City on the Make: 50th Anniversary Edition, Newly Annotated

Nonconformity: Writing on Writing

ASIN: 1583222790

Book Description

A reissue of a classic American novel, with an introduction by Kurt Vonnegut, Nelson Algren's second novel, originally published in 1942, tells the story of Bruno Bicek, a tough from Chicago's Northwest Side, and Steffi, the woman who shares his dream while living his nightmare. "An unusual book and a brilliant book." -- The New York Times

Customer Reviews:

Gritty americana from a forgotten master.......2006-12-02

Never come morning is a exquisite novel of pain and dark urban reality. What makes Algren a better writer than so many others who work in this mileiu is that he doesn't moralize or create one-dimensional heroes. His characters pull you in because they have the complexity and tragic failings of real people. The imagery walks the line between the surreal and the actual, dreams interwoven with the brutal waking reality of inner-city poverty. This book alone puts Algren, who never got much fame and certainly not fortune for his work, on the map of great American writers.

Gritty, but hollow novel about a thug and his life.........2004-08-31

From previous reviews, I got the idea that "Never come Morning" would be gritty, and a masterpiece. Well, that's not the case. It is quite gritty, with EVERYONE a crook, from a Polish barber who is also a pimp, from the one-eyed police detective. The story follows Bruno, a thug who dreams of well..being the Great White Hope. Of course, we know he's a thug, and will always be nothing but a thug. Bruno and his thuggish friends talk in a Chicago dialect that grates on your nerves. Algren is not Mark Twain, so it further alienates the reader when you want to hear English you can recognize. I felt zero sypathy for Bruno's predicament, and I felt sick that Steffi would see anything in this character.

Catcher In The Rye for the rest of us.......2003-10-12

I noticed in another customer review of this book that two key pieces of plot information are provided in the review itself. That is something no reviewer should ever do. Don't let that blemish keep you from buying this remarkable book. Never Come Morning is one of the finest novels you will ever read. This is Catcher In The Rye for the rest of us, for everyone who grew up more worldy than Holden Caufield.

Algren opens a window on Chicago's ethnic, inner city streets. The sights, sounds, smells, words and music of Chicago in the late 1940's are right there in front of you. He then points his highly accurate lens on his character's hearts, minds, concerns, fears, worries, struggles, hopes & dreams.

Never Come Morning is a lyrical, poetic work of fiction that's nonetheless so realistic it could have been yanked straight from the headlines of any city's newspapers, in any era, from the 1940's straight through to 2004. The novel describes the lives of several teenagers living on Chicago's Near Northwest side, in the late 1940's. It is realistic yet never exploitive, heart-wrenching yet never heavy handed.

Those familar with Chicago neighborhoods will delight in seeing The Triangle, Riverview, Humboldt Park, Division Street, Chicago Avenue, Western Avenue, Milwaukee Avenue, Oak Street Beach and Logan Square referenced in print. As El trains fly overhead - some down tracks still with us and some down tracks long-gone - you will be astounded at how well this writer has captured the Chicago of your youth.

Those familar with Chicago characters like the ones in this novel (Bruno Bicek, Steffi Rostenkowski, Catfoot Nowagrodski, Fingers Idzikowski, Fireball Kodadek, Bibleback Watrobinski, Casey Benkowski, Momma Tomek and The Barber) will have to put the book down and take a walk outside. The memories that come flooding back will be too STRONG, and too REAL.

Anyone who's lived in a neighborhood where kids run the nighttime streets, anyone who's ever hung out on a corner, tossed dice against a warehouse wall, walked a freight yard, played ball for a Park District League, been to Riverview, swam at Oak Street or dated a girl from the neighborhood will be shocked from the sheer force of recognition this amazing novel provides.

Yet even those who've never set foot in Chicago will be spellbound by this remarkable, poetic novel about tough kids growing up under tough conditions in a tough town. A must read for anyone interested in American Realism, and/or fiction carved from real life.

Dark and gritty. A work of transition........2000-10-07

Bruno Bicek and Steffi R. have dreams beyond the reality of their Chicago existence and the nightmarish control of the Barber, Bonifacy Konstantine. Bruno Bicek is a boxing contender and Steffi R. is the girlfriend he let be gang-raped. The Barber knows this and that Bruno Bicek has murdered one of the gang. The Barber has Steffi R. in his grasp and has no intention of letting her go. Bruno Bicek feels sure of his chances and intends taking her from him. But the Barber holds all the cards and, for Bruno Bicek and Steffi R. there will be no bright morning.

Never Come Morning has its moments: the fight scenes at the start and end of the book; the scenes in which the characters consider their lives, in a style that will be made much use of in The Man with the Golden Arm. Everything else is dark and gritty, but is not especially effective within the story because of its apparent inclusion for the sake of something anecdotal in order to flesh out the characters' traits and thoughts. In addition, Nelson Algren makes reading this book a chore like he did with The Man with the Golden Arm, by having rapid changes of viewpoint in scenes with a multiplicity of characters. This would have been quite benign given a more omniscient writing style like Fritz Leiber's, but is very distracting here.

Nevertheless, Never Come Morning is engaging, and, taken in overview, is a very satisfactory read, which demonstrates the power in Nelson Algren's writing. A power that in subsequent works, grows and grows.

A seriously under-rated author's most under-rated novel.......1999-10-23

Algren narrates the fall of Bruno Lefty Bicek, small-time hood and prize-fighter. Bicek comes alive under Algren's pen - not a hero, not a villain, but all too human, capable of love and of cowardice. Not as well-known as _The Man With the Golden Arm_ nor _A Walk On the Wild Side_, but, in my opinion, the equal of the first and superior to the second.

Average customer rating:

Reading Nelson Algren
Dated novel that doesn't ring true on any level
Worth reading
No Work and No Play
LIKE A BLOW TO THE SOLAR PLEXUS!

The Man With the Golden Arm
Nelson Algren
Manufacturer: Seven Stories Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Essays | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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A Walk on the Wild Side: A Novel
Chicago: City on the Make: 50th Anniversary Edition, Newly Annotated
The Neon Wilderness
Shortchanged: Life and Debt in the Fringe Economy (Bk Currents)
Bread and Roses: Mills, Migrants, and the Struggle for the American Dream

ASIN: 1583220089

Book Description

Seven Stories Press is proud to release the first critical edition of Nelson Algren's masterpiece on the 50th anniversary of its publication in November 1949. Considered Algren's finest work, The Man with the Golden Arm recounts one man's self-destruction in Chicago's Polish ghetto. The novel's protagonist, Frankie Machine, remains a tragic American hero half a century after Algren created this gritty and relentlessly dark tale of modern urban society.

Customer Reviews:

Reading Nelson Algren.......2006-05-26

This is a wonderful book! Nelson Algren knocks spots off of his contemporaries;chiefly because he actually lived the lives of those he wrote about.
The language is fabulously arkane and is only just seeping into everyday usage.We now know that a 'mark' is a person about to be 'hustled'(ie conned and robbed) and thanks to TV poker we know what the punk has when he looks at 3 J's wired! Unfortuneately,we also know all the drug terms as well.
The plot is wafer thin and largely irrelevent-Frankie Machine kills Louie the pusher;his run ins with the law;his dead beat marriage and affair with Molly-O-;its the cast of division line Chicago slum dwellers that are everything.If you read this fishing for a plot to hook into,you'll soon get lost.But if you read each segmented paragraph as a short story in its own right that merges into a bigger picture;you can't fail to love this magnificent book.Dickens never had such a cast of characters to call on!

Dated novel that doesn't ring true on any level .......2006-03-19

I can accept that this book was a classic in its day and obviously you had to be there then to appreciate its shock value at the time. However, great literature should transcend the time that it was written in and should reach out and speak to future generations. There are plenty of novels from that era that do just that but The Man With The Golden Arm is not one of them. It is ponderous, turgid and lacks any sense of urgency and desperation that its central theme - heroin addiction - should necessitate. Situations and relationships are one-dimensional and cardboard-cutout-like rendering them thoroughly implausible. However, the real failure of this novel is in it's dreadfully antiquated 'hip speech', a failed attempt on the part of Algren to capture the street lingo of the time. Trying to capture speech patterns in print is a delicate task that needs to be executed with skill and precision for it to work, neither qualities which seem apparent here. Instead, it sounds false and clumsy, making the novel unnecessarily difficult to read.

Bottom Line: If you're looking for an accurate depiction of drug addiction in '50s America, you won't find it here.

Worth reading.......2005-12-27

I heard the title The Man with the Golden Arm long before I ever read the book or saw the movie. It's a beautiful, evocative title, but it also makes you think of something grotesque: a man with a shiny prosthetic. When I got older, and knew the story centered on a junkie, the connotation became even more disturbing: an arm jaundiced by the hypo. I was never much into addiction stories and Algren's book (purchased as a shiny new softcover back in the early 80s, when I was spending the greater part of my college loan money on the creation of a private library) sat on my shelf for more than 20 years.

It turns out that the book is quite a good read. Algren locates the source of dealer Frankie Machine's addiction in his WW2 service-he was wounded and got hooked on the morphine that eased the pain of his injury. The novel also makes clear, though, that in spite of his friends' admiration and awe of his Purple Heart, Frankie was no hero. A grunt's grunt, he remained three years a private.

While the novel tells the story of Frankie's several attempts to kick the stuff, what we get out of it is the tale of a loser in a community of losers, people the American dream has left behind: small-time swindlers, dwellers in fleabag tenements, drunks, and sweet girls who can't get a break Among the sad detritus of this universe, located around Chicago's West Division Street, Frankie Machine shines like a star, with his big talk and his talent (the "golden arm" refers to his sure skill dealing cards, which he hopes to transfer to playing the drums in a big band).

Still, his life spirals downward. And although the drugs are central, you can't help feeling that if it weren't morphine that did Frankie in, it would have been something else. At bottom, he doesn't believe he's worth saving; one of the achievements of the novel is that you end up feeling they're all worth saving, not just Frankie, but also his grimier fellows. Algren draws his characters with such vividness that he takes you beyond pity and amusement to pure empathy with their humanity.

No Work and No Play.......2004-02-27

I think this is one of the best novels ever written. People who say Algren romanticizes the poor have clearly not read the book properly, all he does is say they are human just as you. But describing them as low-lifes like some reviewers did, just shows that Algren's message did not come across. This book is about love for humanity. And that is ALL humanity, not just the part that's nicely educated and has a good job and doesn't rob you at night. One reviewer said that Frankie Machine should of just quit taking drugs and sought himself a nice job and everything would of turned out fine. How? Would Frankie be loved then, would his crippled wife be able to walk, would there be no loneliness and desperation. would it stop raining? Would it stop the El from going round and round? I'm sick and tired of people romanticizin' the rich.

LIKE A BLOW TO THE SOLAR PLEXUS!.......2002-10-30

The great Nelson Algren's powerful tale. A work of art. Chicago, down-and-outers struggling with their various demons. One of the finest of all novelists. Algren, as a human being, had heart, wit, intelligence...and it shows. Not many writers today can touch him, although I can think of one or two covering the same turf: trying to make sense out of this insanity called life: Charles Bukowski, George Orwell, Henry Miller, B. Traven (The Cottonpickers), Kirk Alex (Working the Hard Side of the Street), Dan Fante (Chump Change, Spitting Off Tall Buildings) et al. You might want to give N.A's Neon Wilderness a try as well, a terriric short story collection. Algren's books last because his words have meaning to us--and always will.

Average customer rating:

CLASSIC IS RIGHT!
The Neon Wilderness
ALGREN GETS IT DONE!

The Neon Wilderness
Nelson Algren
Manufacturer: Seven Stories Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Essays | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Short Stories | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

A Walk on the Wild Side: A Novel
Chicago: City on the Make: 50th Anniversary Edition, Newly Annotated
The Man with the Golden Arm
Never Come Morning
The Last Carousel

ASIN: 1583225501

Book Description

The stories in The Neon Wilderness established Algren in the pantheon of American writers and formed the vein that he mined for all his subsequent novels and stories. Included are "A Bottle of Milk for Mother," about a youth being cornered for a murder, "The Face on the Barroom Floor," in which a legless man nearly pummels someone to death, and "So Help Me," Algren's first published story. "Algren's short stories are now generally acknowledged to be literary triumphs." — The New York Times

Customer Reviews:

CLASSIC IS RIGHT!.......2002-10-30

A true marvel. Not many writers come close. Nelson Algren is at the very top of the heap: original, compassionate, funny, insightful. You know, we read many books, and once we have finished with the book we toss it aside and forget about it. With Algren it's different. You read his stuff and can't help feeling cheated at not having known the man, not having ever had a chance to meet the guy. Wish there was a way to sit down and have a beer with the man, light up a stogie and have a good chat with the genius who created this masterful story collection. The writing is gritty and true, heartfelt. Brings to mind several other writers who had this knack of writing in this kind of honest, unflinching style: John O'Brien (Leaving Las Vegas), B. Traven (take your pick: Treasure of Sierra Madre, Cottonpickers, etc.) Knut Hamsun (Hunger), Eugene O'Neill (Long Day's Journey Into Night), Celine (Journey to the End of the Night), Kirk Alex (Working the Hard Side of the Street), Chester Himes (If He Hollers Let Him Go).
All of the above had their own style, of course, but the thing they had in common was in the balls they showed by not flinching away from the gritty, life lived by so many who weren't born with deep pockets, who didn't have it easy.

Writing from the gut. Algren lives. Read THE NEON WILDERNESS, and give some of the others a try as well.
This is writing for people who love books and love to read. Shut your TV sets off and pick up a good book--and you can start right here, with Algren's story collectiion.

The Neon Wilderness.......2001-01-24

Algren's writing in this collection of short stories has very lyrical and often nightmarish quality. It is both beautiful and brutally frank. Algren paints a unapologetic picture of Chicago and it's people with his wonderful sense of humor and irony. Read this book if you want an unblinking look at people at their best and worst.

ALGREN GETS IT DONE!.......1999-12-02

One of the most beautiful collection of short stories I've ever read. I am a devoted Nelson Algren fan, and if you read this, you'll understand why. This was a man who understood Chicago, who had the balls to plunge the murky depths of her society and find astonishing beauty. The blue imagery of his work is evocative, breathtaking, and genuine; it makes me mourn and long for a Chicago that no longer exists. The masculinity, the authority, the depth of Algren's identification with the rejects, the drug addicts, the gamblers, the hookers make WILDERNESS a superb work of art. This man tells it like it was; no glamorizing, no condescension, only the most profound understanding and a multi-layered sense of humor that, to paraphrase Hemingway (a huge Algren fan), makes you feel as if you took a punch. I haven't read the NEON WILDERNESS in a long time, but the mere mention of it makes we want to re-read it, especially the first story, "The Captain Has Bad Dreams." I also recommend BOSS by Mike Royko and just about anything by Studs Terkel.

Chicago: City on the Make: 50th Anniversary Edition, Newly Annotated

Average customer rating:

Not Algren's Strongest Piece
Marvelous prose paean for the city by the lake
Youýdýve had to been there.
Gorgeous - but WARNING: Prose Poem
Algren saw it all...

Chicago: City on the Make: 50th Anniversary Edition, Newly Annotated
Nelson Algren
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Chicago Poems (Dover Thrift Editions)
The Man with the Golden Arm
The Neon Wilderness
A Walk on the Wild Side: A Novel
Never Come Morning

ASIN: 0226013855

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. This 50th anniversary edition is newly annotated with explanations for everything from slang to Chicagoans, famous and obscure, to what the Black Sox scandal was and why it mattered. More accessible than ever, this is, as Studs Terkel says, "the best book about Chicago."

"Algren's Chicago, a kind of American annex to Dante's inferno, is a nether world peopled by rat--faced hustlers and money--loving demons who crawl in the writer's brilliant, sordid, uncompromising and twisted imagination. . . . [This book] searches a city's heart and mind rather than its avenues and public buildings."--New York Times Book Review

"This short, crisp, fighting creed is both a social document and a love poem, a script in which a lover explains his city's recurring ruthlessness and latent power; in which an artist recognizes that these are portents not of death, but of life."--New York Herald Tribune

Nelson Algren (1909-1981) won the National Book Award in 1950 for The Man with the Golden Arm. His other works include Walk on the Wild Side, The Neon Wilderness, and Conversations with Nelson Algren, the last available from the University of Chicago Press. David Schmittgens teaches English at St. Ignatius College Prep in Chicago, Illinois. Bill Savage is a lecturer at Northwestern University and coeditor of the 50th Anniversary Critical Edition of The Man with the Golden Arm.

Customer Reviews:

Not Algren's Strongest Piece.......2007-01-19

For a great American writer like Algren and with his love of the city, one could expect more. Perhaps this sort of loose style (it has been called a prose poem) just wasn't his forte. The book starts off strong, but breaks into highly personal memories, and gets a little slow as he covers the same ground again and again. In short, it needed editing. Many of the references are so particular that they don't translate well and have aged poorly- Algren failed to find the universal like Whitman did.

Don't let this book turn you off to Algren's superb fiction writing. He remains a giant in American literature. This just wasn't his day.

Marvelous prose paean for the city by the lake.......2003-09-12

Although I have lived in Chicago for many years now, I am not a native Chicagoan, and I have to say that the attitudes and visions of Chicago that one finds in Nelson Algren's are not held by most of the people I have gotten to know well in Chicago. But, then, most of the people I know are also not native Chicagoans. The swagger, the love-hate, the cynicism, and the love and civic pride that manage to emerge despite the cynical pessimism are very definitely found in many of those I have come to know who were born and raised in the city.

Nelson Algren's Chicago was one that was more strictly American than it is today, less international, more Midwestern, more radical, less conventional. It is a Chicago that in many ways no longer exists. This can be felt in the book's narrative voice. Algren writes in a prose that sounds like Carl Sandburg drenched in Baudelaire, and the various sections of the book sound more than anything like the kind of stuff that Baudelaire would have written had he strolled the streets of Chicago rather than Paris. The prose is always unique, frequently beautiful, oftentimes stunning. There are definitely times that it will be all but impenetrable to someone not well schooled in Chicago's geography and its history. If one really wanted to get all the references and historical citations, one should consider reading Donald Miller's CITY OF THE CENTURY, which will clue one in on most of the 19th century and more obscure references.

But in a sense, being able to identify all the names and places isn't all that crucial. The heart of the book is intelligible regardless. An essential literary work about one of the world's great cities, by one of its great writers.

Youýdýve had to been there........2003-05-25

Well written though this is, ...City on the Make' does require a good knowledge of Chicago's history to keep going with it and to understand the connections.

I gave up after chapter two because of my lack of background knowledge and because I felt that this was a piece of writing that had been worked at till it was little more than an exercise in style.

It had a lot of energy but lacked the spontaneity to make it seem fresh. And it read like preaching to the converted, as opposed to being persuasive.

Gorgeous - but WARNING: Prose Poem.......2003-03-18

The city of big shoulders is my home, so perhaps I am too biased to write an objective review. In my opinion, however, I think this is one of the most gorgeous pieces of literature ever written.

I saw this performed live on the rooftop of a South Michigan Ave loft as the sun set over the west side and is started to rain. The little intertwined stories and metaphors and moments of beauty make the book a read that tastes tremendous on your tongue.

THE WARNING: yes, here is is. This is a prose poem. It's not a collection of short stories or a novel. It reads quite easily, but if you are turned off by that sort of thing, skip this book. There are moments of slightly inaccessible, albeit wonderful, language and it helps to know your history..

That said, if you love Chicago as I do, you will love Algren's City on the Make...

Algren saw it all..........2000-03-07

Nelson Algren expresses a vision of a city in Chicago: City on the Make like no other New York or Los Angeles had been envisioned. Chicago is shown as a city of two natures. Algren magnifies this duality of his town through the imagery and diction of his description of Chicago's physical appearance, historical figures and the divisions of the hustler and the square which show how this twofold nature creates Algren's ambiguous admiration for his city: Chicago.

Average customer rating:

Timeless Algren Still Loud and Clear
Only pretentious dweebs title their online reviews
Brilliance Cooked To Critical Mass
Brilliance Cooked To Critical Mass

Nonconformity: Writing on Writing
Nelson Algren
Manufacturer: Seven Stories Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Writing Skills | Writing | Reference | Subjects | Books

General | Reference | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

The Neon Wilderness
The Man with the Golden Arm
Chicago: City on the Make: 50th Anniversary Edition, Newly Annotated
A Walk on the Wild Side: A Novel
Never Come Morning

ASIN: 1888363622

Amazon.com

During the McCarthy era, writer Nelson Algren was fingered as a Communist. The author of hugely successful novels including The Man with the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side, Algren lost a contract with his publisher, Doubleday, for a book of essays. The manuscript for those essays had been missing for nearly four decades. But publisher Daniel Simon has resurrected the work, a collection of diatribes and rants on the life and philosophy of the modern writer. The book reflects the depth of Algren's sensitivity, which was at odds with the tough-guy image he tried to present.

Customer Reviews:

Timeless Algren Still Loud and Clear.......2003-01-24

Written with furious urgency, sharp economy, and timeless resonance, Nelson Algren's Nonconformity: Writing on Writing is an often bleak, yet always sentient book-length essay on the role of artists, particularly writers, who work from, about, and for an American culture that doesn't value the significance of artistic contribution, and that actually rejects and fears artistic expression when it moves against the forces of pious consumerism, blind nationalism, and disconnected apathy. Back in Algren's day, those forces were personified by names like McCarthy and McCarran, Sheen and Oursler; today they're Rumsfeld and Ashcroft, Limbaugh and Savage. And the Red Scare of Algren's world had turned into today's "Arabic threat" that fosters needless suspicion and faith in puppet leaders who call for roundups of the innocent. Algren Bolsters his insights with a barrage of memorable quotes from the Masters: Dostoevsky, Twain, and most importantly, Fitzgerald--none of whom, it seems, ever worked in the comfort of societal/institutional trust and acceptance, no matter how well known they were. Will there ever be comfort for the writer? "A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is for armed robbery," Algren explains. There are many, many more forces working against the writer today, especially against the young and unknown: fewer venues to reach the respect of an audience, and a culture that would much rather spend its time in front of the television, at the movies, or on the internet--but rarely on moving works of complex, serious literature. No writers have ever had it easy, and if you're in for the long haul of lonely obscurity, this book is good company to keep. Algren is empowering. His thesis is louder, clearer, and more important than ever.

Only pretentious dweebs title their online reviews.......2000-05-21

I've been writing for ten years and this book has become a bible for me. I planned on reading one chapter one night before going to bed, and instead stayed up until dawn reading it and thinking about what the author's compelling essays. It's the best book I've ever read about the art of writing and the responsibility of writers.

It used to be much easier to submit reviews. These days every company pretends like its website is the only one people will ever visit on the web. Gack.

Brilliance Cooked To Critical Mass.......2000-03-02

This book stalks sure footed through the dense thicket of modern American literature, with The Novel and Nelson Algren firmly at its center. It is at once entirely personal and, sonehow, universal at the same time. What it has to say about about writing evokes the kindred spirit shared by all great writiers, vastlty differing though thier style and temperments might be. Each exquisitely realized chapter is peppered with excerpts of their prose in such a way that it fairly leaps off the page, providing a critical mass of context and vibrancy to the very difficult subject of what it is that writers do and do best. Get it. Read it. Love it. I certainly did.

Brilliance Cooked To Critical Mass.......2000-03-02

Average customer rating:

Notes From A Sea Diary
Nelson ALGREN
Manufacturer: Putnam
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000AN47BA

Average customer rating:

Somebody in Boots
Nelson Algren
Manufacturer: Berkley Publishing Corporation
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OF6DA2

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Chicago: City on The Make
Nelson Algren
Manufacturer: Doubleday and Co., Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000EG48SK

Product Description

His fifth book. Homage to his adopted city.

Average customer rating:

The Man With The Golden Arm
Nelson Algren
Manufacturer: Fawcett Crest
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000GOT7KO

Authors:

Authors

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