Product Description

In this major, posthumous work, the winner of the First National Book Award presents an illuminating, highly quotable essay on the craft of writing, the art of literature, and the relationship of the writer to society. Written in the early 1950s, this eagerly-sought project was suddenly canceled when Algren was denounced as a former Communist.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #991293 in Books
• Published on: 2003-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 130 pages

Amazon.com Review
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.

From Publishers Weekly
In works like The Man with the Golden Arm, Algren (1909-1981) looked at the rough-and-tumble lives of petty criminals and drug addicts, writing with a tough compassion without romanticizing his subject matter. These same characteristics inform this odd and passionate manifesto, which he wrote in the early 1950s but which is seeing publication for the first time now, edited by Simon, the publisher of Seven Stories. While in part a look at the writing life and American literature, the book's central obsession is with the political pressures put on artists during the '50s and the larger pressures toward conformity Algren saw in American life. While at times rambling and at other times dated, the depth of feeling running beneath Algren's words is palpable, and his demand that American artists fully engage with their culture remains relevant. Anyone seeking to understand how the McCarthy era affected the inner lives of artists will find much material here. FBI informants who denounced Algren to his then-publisher Doubleday helped prevent this book from being published at the time it was written. Readers will find much that bears thought in this wise, courageous and humane book.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
A previously unpublished work from the author of The Man With the Golden Arm and other masterful portraits of the seamy underside of urban America. This volume, essentially a lengthy essay in book form, was written by Algren in the early 1950s, at the peak of his fame and the height of the McCarthy era. At the time, his lengthy affair with Simone de Beauvoir was coming to an unhappy end and he was throwing himself into the public arena in reaction to that private pain. Nonconformity shows its origins in those multiple traumas. Opening with a brief and mournful recollection of F. Scott Fitzgerald's ``crack-up,'' Algren jumps into a passionate defense of the writer as someone who must live out the emotions of his characters, no easy thing in an era in which all the forces of the state and the market seem to be calculated to produce conformist writing that commits nothing, dares nothing, and achieves nothing. It is a time, he writes repeatedly, in which Americans are caught ``between the H bomb and the A,'' with the threat of internal destruction greater than any threat from the so-called Red Menace. At such a time, Algren says defiantly, a writer's attitude to his readers should be ``this ain't what you rung for, Jack--but it's what you're damned well getting.'' That's certainly the mind-set that dominated Algren's best writing. The afterword and notes by Simon are useful, placing the essay in a larger biographical and historical context. However, the editor's claim that this is ``Algren's only book-length work of non-fiction'' is dubious; Algren also turned out two substantial travel books and an essay of similar length on his native Chicago, each of them filled with the same corrosive writing on the American scene. That said, this is a typically refreshing breath of cigarette-smoke-filled air from one of our most underrated writers, angry and funny as Algren usually is. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

A meaningful YAWP
Nelson Algren was one of a kind... or was he? In this wonderful volume, we see that Algren suffered with those who suffered for their individuality and seethed at those who would smother it in any of us, artists or not. This is a very quick read, and has been edited (which I know thanks for an amazing Afterword) for perfect clarity. He wrote this in the '50s, and so some of his references are unfamiliar -- but HA! No problem, because the editors have made extensive footnotes about these references, footnotes which are interesting reading in their own right. If you care about American literature, politics, or freedom, reading this book will help you see you're the latest in a long line of brilliantly similar-minded people.

Disappointing
Disappointing, compared to Algren's brilliant fiction. To me, this work is a result of Algren being hounded by critics and media types to "explain" who he is and how he writes. His comments are all over the map, just basically rambling, not coherent essays. Algren is one of my favorite writers, but it's all about his short stories and novels. This work is strangely unrelated, and draws upon the media's need to dissect his mind, and justify his existence... Algren's fiction is revelatory, poetic, disturbing and sad. That's where his genius lies. Don't waste time on apologetics. Read Man with the Golden Arm and Never Come Morning. They go straight to the heart. They are works of genius.

Brilliance Cooked To Critical Mass
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.