The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    Nelson Algren: The Great, Forgotten Progressive Writer That You Should Know

    By Colin Asher on Wed, 01/02/2013 - 5:48pm |

    This month the Believer was kind enough to grant me 9,000 words worth of page space for a lengthy homage to Nelson Algren, a great-but-mostly-forgotten-writer. Algren has been dead for 31-years and obscure for far longer but his writing continues to deserve attention and consideration.

    If I hold faith with any writer it's Algren. He had an expansive view of literature. To him it was a game played for the highest possible stakes. A writer's role, he believed, was to tell the truest stories they can tell, and always to challenge the status quo. He would have nothing but contempt for this current writerly obsession with "branding" oneself or "cultivating an audience." High-minded pronouncements aside, he was also just my type of guy. He hoboed through the Great Depression (riding the rails even after signing his first book contract) and joined the Communist Party, only to be chastised for throwing a too-bawdy party. He collected material for his eleven books by haunting the county morgue, police line ups, underground card games and weekly rate hotels. And still found enough time to win the first National Book Award, give Hemingway cause to proclaim him the second best American writer (after Faulkner), romance Simone de Beauvoir, and call Joe McCarthy unqualified for any office but dog catcher (long before Ed Murrow found the nerve to take the man on).

    He deserves a larger role in our literary and social discourse, and I hope I've done my small part to make that happen.

    Here is the full text of the story for anyone interested.

    Comments

    Thanks for this. I have to catch my connecting flight but plan to return to the full article. The snip of his poem at his funeral is worth the read alone.

    by Anonymous trope (not verified) on Wed, 01/02/2013 - 6:46pm

    Great article!

    I just spent a few days contemplating Alger Hiss along with his nemesis.

    Witt Chambers was a f&^k.

    We were afeared of the commies in the teens and twenties.

    We were comrads with the commies in the 30's and 40's.

    Hell, we were nationalist socialists on some level during WWII.

    No more cars; we manufacture weapons and tanks and bombers and....

    We shall have coupons and wage and price controls and....

    This was all so very silly.

    The Heritage Fascist Commission or whatever they call themselves had a full three hour 'panel' on the dangers of communism and Witt and Hiss and....

    It pissed me off.

    the end

    hahahaah


    by Richard Day on Wed, 01/02/2013 - 9:47pm

    I admit I was not really familiar with Mr. Algren until I read Deirdre Bair's biography of Simone DeBeauvoir.  Her book made me feel there was something immensely sad about him.   Thanks for posting this article.  I look forward to reading it tomorrow.

     

     


    by MrSmith1 on Wed, 01/02/2013 - 10:35pm

    There was something intensely sad about him, no doubt. But he hid it well, beneath bravado and bluster and a whole lot of jokes. He always said if he couldn't make a living as a writer he would become a stand up comedian, an intensely sad lot if there ever was one. Hope you enjoy the article.


    by Colin Asher on Thu, 01/03/2013 - 8:17am

    Two professions of frequent rejections and being misunderstood...


    by Michael Maiello on Thu, 01/03/2013 - 8:26am

    A bit like Jim Thompson - http://www.moviemaker.com/directing/article/jim_thompsons_lost_hollywood_years_3165/


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 01/03/2013 - 7:23am

    Interesting.  I know "The Killer Inside Me," but I never knew that Thompson went out to Hollywood.

    You all have read Nathaniel West, right?  As Algren was a favorite of Hemingway's, West was a favorite of Fitzgerald's.


    by Michael Maiello on Thu, 01/03/2013 - 8:08am

    Haven't - some ideas for 2013 reading, away from blogs & mass media anyone?


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 01/03/2013 - 9:25am

    "The Day Of The Locust" was West's big Hoolywood novel.  "Miss Lonelyhearts" is my favorite, though -- about a hardboiled guy who writes an advice column, it's bitterly funny.

    I also think that people around here would love "A Cool Million," which is West's satiric send-up of Horatio Alger stories.  It reads something like Voltaire as reinvisioned by the staff of Mad Magazine.

     


    by Michael Maiello on Thu, 01/03/2013 - 10:07am

    I can see you doing elevator pitches at MGM...


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 01/03/2013 - 12:24pm

    If only...


    by Michael Maiello on Thu, 01/03/2013 - 1:41pm

    Yeah, a bit. Both were considered literary figures in Europe, but thought of as pulp writers in the US (not for Algren's entire career, but certainly at the beginning). And they, obviously,  shared some common thematic ground.


    by Colin Asher on Thu, 01/03/2013 - 8:19am

    Thanks for sharing, Colin, and for making me aware of Algren. As I may have mentioned to you, I started reading Chicago: City on the Make aloud to my wife. Great stuff, and it works really well when read aloud.


    by Michael Wolraich on Thu, 01/03/2013 - 2:46pm

    Very glad to hear you're enjoying City on the Make, it's a beautiful little book. It contains one of my favorite Algren passages:


    By nights when the yellow salamanders of the EL bend all one way and the cold rain runs with the red-lit rain. By the way the city's million wires are burdened only by lightest snow; when chairs are stacked and glasses are turned and arc-lamps all are dimmed. By days when the wind bangs alley gates ajar and the sun goes by on the wind. By nights when the moon is an only child above the measured thunder of the cars, you may know Chicago's heart at last.


    by Colin Asher on Fri, 01/04/2013 - 10:17pm

    It's funny, because Algren is so deeply American... but this reminds me of Bertolt Brecht on Chicago.  I don't have a passage to give you.  It's more the mood of a production of The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui that I saw once.  You could also fit into that passage, of course, the rainy night of the first act of Glengarry Glen Ross.  I know that some of the associations I've made in this thread are academically spurious.  But this whole topic has made me think of a whole lot of things, especially about the written and dramatic arts and what they have meant and could mean now that so much had been disrupted.


    by Michael Maiello on Fri, 01/04/2013 - 11:57pm

    Hi Colin--we have spent the last four years working on the ultimate (and so far, only) documentary on Nelson Algren and are excited to tell you that we will be finished by Fall of 2013.  We hope you check us out and spread the word.  Also, feel free to contact me via email if you want more information.  The movie has been a labor of love, but well worth, as I know you understand.  Algrenthemovie.com and Facebook.com/algrenthemovie.


    by Michael Caplan (not verified) on Tue, 01/08/2013 - 8:04pm