Volume 37, Number 11 · June 28, 1990
Underground Man
By Thomas R. Edwards
Never Come Morning
by Nelson Algren, Introduction by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., interview with the author by H.E.F. Donohue
Four Walls Eight Windows, 310 pp., $7.95 (paper)
The Neon Wilderness
by Nelson Algren, Introduction by Tom Corson, Afterword by Studs Terkel
Four Walls Eight Windows, 304 pp., $8.95 (paper)
The Man with the Golden Arm
by Nelson Algren, introduction by James R. Giles
Four Walls Eight Windows, 343 pp., $9.95 (paper)
A Walk on the Wild Side
by Nelson Algren, foreword by Russell Banks
Thunder's Mouth Press, 346 pp., $12.95 (paper)
Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side
by Bettina Drew
Putnam's, 416 pp., $27.95
Confronting the Horror: The Novels of Nelson Algren
by James R. Giles
Kent State University Press, 132 pp., $21.00
Nelson Algren's Chicago
photographs by Art Shay
University of Illinois Press, 122 pp., $24.95
Nelson Algren died in 1981, but during the last twenty-five years of his life he had published no book of new fiction. Many younger readers now have only the dimmest idea, or none at all, of who he was. His then shocking novel The Man with the Golden Arm (1949) won the first National Book Award for fiction, and Hemingway thought Algren 'possibly the best writer under 50…writing today.' But what then seemed to some a major career in progress petered petered out, and his later travel writings and literary journalism and The Devil's Stocking (published posthumously in 1983), his fictionalized version of the Hurricane Carter murder case, did little to win a new audience. He was remembered, I suppose, mostly as the nominal source of two bad movies he himself despised and, to the cognoscenti, as the lover who gave Simone de Beauvoir her first experience of complete sexual pleasure.
Review, 3627 words
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