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).