Nelson Algren

The man with the golden arm

New Orleans in the 1930s is the seamy world of lost and lovelorn Dove Linkhorn and Kitty Twist, of their lust and violence, and of their toughness and survival

A Novel

A Walk on the Wild Side

The collection of short stories that launched Nelson Algren to literary fame. Includes the Paris Review interview of Algren by Terry Southern.

The Neon Wilderness

In this highly acclaimed novel, Nelson Algren depicts the lives of the Poles living in the notoriously poor area of Chicago's Northwest Side, documenting the overwhelming sense of frustration and despondency that they are afflicted with.

Never Come Morning

David Schmittgens

Bill Savage

Newly annotated with everything from slang to Chicagoans--famous and obscure--this book is, as Studs Terkel says, "the best book about Chicago".

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

Chicago

Simone de Beauvoir

Ellen Gordon Reeves

Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir

Vanessa Kling

A collection of three hundred letters chronicles the twenty-year relationship between the two authors

Letters to Nelson Algren

A Transatlantic Love Affair

During the Depression, Cass McKay, a young man from Texas, is forced to ride the rails, live in hobo jungles, and search for handouts

Somebody in Boots

In Nonconformity, Algren identifies the essential nature of the writer's relation to society drawing examples from Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Twain, and Fitzgerald.

Writing on Writing

Nonconformity

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.

City on the Make

Twelve stories on the author's hobo days in Texas where he searched for work during the 1930s depression and was jailed for stealing. In one story he writes, "God help you if you run and God help you if you fight; God help you if you're broke and God help you if you're black."

The Texas Stories of Nelson Algren

The devil's stocking

Altın kollu adam

The fiction and reportage collected here were written in ports and ships around the world.

The Last Carousel

The fiction and reportage included in The Last Carousel, one of the final collections published during Nelson Algren's lifetime, was written on ships and in ports of call around the world, and includes accounts of brothels in Vietnam and Mexico, stories of the boxing ring, and reminiscences of Algren's beloved Chicago White Sox, among other subjects. In this collection, not just Algren's intensity but his diversity are revealed and celebrated.

The Man with the Golden Arm

"'I been hungry all my life, all the time,' he told himself, 'I never get my teeth into anythin' all my own.' Too hungry for the arid place he'd been born in.... A hunger that might, wolflike, lie sleeping for an hour or a day. Or else waken and keep a man in trouble the rest of his life...." This is the story of Bruno "Lefty" Bicek -- raised in the dark shadow of the Division Street El, deep in the Chicago slums -- of Lefty's girl, Steffi, and of his gang. It is the story of a struggle -- struggle to climb out of the slums, to appease the hunger, to make a name that would bring some kind of glory. In the classic American realist tradition, Nelson Algren has created a novel that vibrates with the life of Chicago, the teeming Polish slums, the boxing rings, the brothels, and the jails -- and those like Lefty Bicek and his Steffie who people this world.

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

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.

Chicago, City on the Make

H. E. F. Donohue

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.

Nelson Algren

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