Nelson Algren

With its depictions of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, A Walk in the Wild Side has found a place in the imaginations of all generations since it first appeared. As Algren admitted, the book "wasn't written...

Bruno Bicek, "Lefty," is a prizefighter and small-time hood in Chicago.....

A novel of rare genius, The Man with the Golden Arm recounts the life of Francis Majcinek, "Frankie Machine," who returned from World War II with a Purple Heart and a morphine habit. He relies on morphine to numb the pain of a war injury and the guilt he feels for a drunken spree that put his...

As rock and roll novelist Tom Carson writes in his introduction, “The Neon Wilderness is the pivotal book of Nelson Algren’s career - the one which bid a subdued but determined farewell to everything that had earlier made him no more than just another good writer, and inaugurated the...

Nelson Algren sought humanity in the urban wilderness of postwar America, where his powerful voice rose from behind the billboards and down tin-can alleys, from among the marginalized and ignored, the outcasts and scapegoats, the punks and junkies, the whores and down-on-their luck gamblers, the...

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...

A boxer finds himself the targeted victim of a vindictive group in the story of one man’s battle against injustice in the dark underworld of urban America. The Devil’s Stocking is the story of Ruby Calhoun, a boxer accused of murder in a shadowy world of low-purse fighters, cops, con artists...

Nelson Algren was a renowned writer, known for his penetrating and influential social novels such as The Man with the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side. Originally published in 1935, Somebody in Boots was Algren’s first novel, based on his experiences living in Texas during the Great...

O. Henry and National Book Award-winning author Nelson Algren has inspired thousands with his tough, gritty accounts of urban life. Written over the course of four decades, this collection of 12 stories centers around Depression-era Texas. Characterized by small-town strife, political corruption...

The struggle to write with deep emotion is the subject of this extraordinary book, the previously unpublished credo of one of America’s greatest 20th-century writers. “You don’t write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich”, writes...

Nelson Algren’s two travel writing books describe his journeys through the seamier sides of great American cities and the international social and political landscapes of the mid-1960s. Algren at Sea brings them together in one volume. Notes from a Sea Diary offers one of the most remarkable...