Review by Choice Review
Algren (1909--81) is best known for his novel The Man with the Golden Arm (1949)--which was made into a gritty film starring Frank Sinatra--and for his famous affair with Simone de Beauvoir. Identified with Chicago and heir to the socialist/realist school of fiction pioneered by Theodore Dreiser and James Farrell (the latter gets a few pages in the biography), Algren, unlike many writers aspiring to greatness, did not have a high opinion of himself. He even referred to himself as a "loser." Asher (Graduate Center, CUNY) thinks otherwise and details the merits of Algren's fiction. A radical writer in every sense, Algren was never satisfied unless he thought he had rooted out the corruption of society as well as of his own soul. If not a loser, Algren often was a loner. One might quarrel with some of Asher's dodges (for example, he reports that Algren "must have swooned" when he read Martha Gellhorn's report that Hemingway was touting his work), but he does all the things expected of a state-of-the-art biographer: conduct interviews, perform archival research, and reveal new material, such as Algren's huge FBI file. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. --Carl Rollyson, emeritus, Bernard M. Baruch College, CUNY
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
"NEVER A LOVELY SO REAL," the luminous title of Colin Asher's absorbing new biography of the once famous but now neglected Chicago writer Nelson Algren (1909-81), draws upon a 1951 essay - commissioned by Holiday magazine during a period of civic boosterism at the height of the Red scare - in which Algren expressed his love for his hometown's grittier neighborhoods. "Once you've come to be part of this particular patch," he observed, "you'll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real." In the same essay, Algren, who a year earlier had won the first National Book Award for his best-selling novel "The Man With the Golden Arm," also expressed his anger about the deepening class divisions that he felt were undermining hope for a better postwar city and world. Unnerved by the political content, and without consulting him, Algren's editors at Holiday cut the essay in half before publishing it. Fortunately, Doubleday had more courage and released the complete essay as a book, "Chicago: City on the Make," a slim classic that combines poetry, personal recollections and acerbic political commentary in ways that remind a reader today of both Walt Whitman and Tom Wolfe. Algren's assertion that "it's everyone for himself in this hired air" conveys a zest that the phrase "income inequality" lacks. Asher, an instructor at the City University of New York, scrupulously attempts to separate facts from myths (some created by Algren himself) as he explores how a writer who produced prose-poetry of such a high order could now be largely forgotten. Algren led a big life that included such diverse experiences as immersion, while a student at the University of Illinois, in the Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius; conviction for stealing a typewriter, which elicited the mercy of probation from a small-town Texas jury sympathetic to the argument that the defendant was like a carpenter who could not afford his tools; interaction with the Communist Party as a member of the "proletarian" school of American writers; F.B.I. surveillance personally authorized by J. Edgar Hoover; three marriages (two to the same woman); and a trans-Atlantic romance with Simone de Beauvoir. That affair, which began in 1947 when Beauvoir visited Chicago on a lecture tour and lasted about 12 years, seems to be one of the few things otherwise well-read people know about Algren today. The so-called proletarian writers of Chicago, including Algren's near-contemporaries James T Farrell and Richard Wright (a close friend until 1946, when he emigrated to France and Algren broke with him), wrote about working-class people without prettying up their lives. No writer in thrall to strict leftist ideology could ever have depicted a character like the ill-fated card dealer and drug addict Frankie Machine in "Golden Arm," who says, "1 never get nowhere but 1 pay my own fare all the way." The director Otto Preminger realized how unpalatable Frankie's inevitable death (in the novel) would be to a mass audience, so in the 1955 movie starring Frank Sinatra, the man with the tarnished life walks off with his girlfriend, played by Kim Novak, instead of committing suicide. Algren hated the film. Algren, born Nelson Algren Abraham, is rarely called a Jewish writer, because he wrote relatively little about Jews even though he was one (secular, not observant). His paternal grandfather, Nils Ahlgren, was a Swedish Lutheran who became enthralled by the Hebrew Bible, declared himself a Jew, renamed himself Isaac Ben Abraham and immigrated to America, where both he and Nelson's father, Gershom, married Jewish women. Nelson spent most of his writing life near Chicago's largest Polish "patch" and, later, in Gary, fnd. Like millions of Americans during the Depression, young Nelson also spent time roaming the country in search of work. His first novel, "Somebody in Boots" (1935), describes those experiences, including a thinly veiled account of his 1934 stay in the Texas jail where he awaited trial for typewriter theft. Asher's is not the first biography of Algren, who did not write anything in the last two decades of his life that attracted either the public attention or the critical controversy of "Golden Arm" or "A Walk on the Wild Side" (1956), which was also made into a movie. The reviews of "Wild Side" were much more negative, Cold War literary politics having intensified between 1949 and 1956. Norman Podhoretz, in a 1956 New Yorker essay titled "The Man With the Golden Beef," described Algren as a miscreant who believed that "we live in a society whose bums and tramps are better men than the preachers and the politicians and the otherwise respectables." Respectable to whom? Podhoretz seemed furious at the idea that the wretched of the earth might not be wholly responsible for their wretchedness. The first biography of Algren was published in 1989 - too soon after his death for reconsideration of a novelist whose emphasis on the unfortunate was then deeply at odds with American culture. Another biography, published in October 2016, appeared in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump's election as president. The timing of Asher's book, by contrast, is fortuitous, because many Americans are now preoccupied by economic and class disparities in ways not seen since the Depression. Asher also obtained access to a virtually unredacted copy of Algren's lengthy F.B.I. file. Asher claims that Algren was a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s; certainly he was involved in causes and organizations supported by the party. In 1950, the F.B.I. stepped up its surveillance of Algren after Louis Budenz, a former managing editor of The Daily Worker who had renounced communism, told an agent he had heard that Algren was a "loyal member of the Communist Party." Asher chronicles meticulously the kind of government intrusions whose petty cruelty can still shock. Phone calls were made to his mother, Goldie, who on one occasion, assuming that the agent on the other end of the line was a friend of Algren's, "bragged about her son's accomplishments at length." In 1953, Algren was denied a passport to visit France - a common tactic used against those suspected of communist leanings at the time. He was not able to travel abroad again until 1959. The long period when he could not visit Beauvoir in France certainly did their relationship no good, but she was never going to leave Paris and her stifling relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, and Algren was not going to leave the United States. After making a trip to Paris in 1959 to reconnect with Beauvoir, Algren never saw her again. Nevertheless, when she was buried in Montmartre Cemetery in 1986 (alongside Sartre, of course) Beauvoir was wearing a ring Algren had given her. The literary gossip in this biography, much of it drawn from letters, is intriguing, witty and sometimes acidic. After "Golden Arm," Ernest Hemingway wrote Algren a letter comparing him favorably to "the fading Faulkner" and "that overgrown Lil Abner Thomas Wolfe." Against this backdrop, Hemingway wrote, Algren "comes like a corvette or even a big destroyer when one of those things is what you need and need it badly and at once and for keeps." Asher never quite arrives - this is a compliment, not a criticism - at a persuasive explanation for Algren's long literary decline, before his death in Sag Harbor (he had finally left Chicago), on Long Island. The F.B.I. pressure of the 1950s is insufficient to explain why, in the 1960s and '70s, Algren did not practice his craft with his earlier diligence. Asher may be right to speculate that the verdicts of the Cold War critics, frequently dismissing Algren as a semi-educated lunkhead (who just happened to worship Dostoyevsky and Chekhov), have had an outsize influence on his reputation. But when a great writer stops writing, something internal as well as external is always in play. We are currently experiencing a revival of interest in writers - white and black, male and female - shaped by the uncertainties of the 1930s in ways that resonate strongly today. This biography provides an invaluable introduction to one of the best of them. SUSAN JACOBY is the author of "The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Why would a renowned writer of revolutionary lyricism whose books sold in the millions tumble into obscurity? There were various theories about Nelson Algren's near erasure, and he himself was responsible for some of the misconceptions about his life, but the deepest misunderstandings involved closed FBI files. Asher, the third biographer to tackle Algren's puzzling story, following Mary Wisniewski's Algren (2016), was the first to see the full documentation of the agency's long surveillance of the outspoken writer and champion of the poor and disenfranchised, and that access enables him to bring a new perspective to the unconventional, righteously literary, and rough-and-tumble life of the author of The Man with the Golden Arm (1949) and A Walk on the Wild Side (1956). In a vigorously detailed yet swiftly flowing narrative, Asher chronicles Algren's strained Chicago youth; the start of his gambling habit, which became the gateway to his compassionate fascination with the city's underworld; his daring dissent; his perpetual money troubles; his difficult relationships and severe depression; his determined writing of books that ignited both controversy and acclaim; and his uncanny ability to rebound and reinvent himself. As he presents Algren as a seminal American writer focused on injustice in this captivating, redefining, and sharply relevant biography, Asher also reveals how the insidious abuse of power by the federal government destroys lives.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Aiming to place Nelson Algren in the literary canon, Asher, a literature instructor at CUNY, offers a thorough, admiring, and, most likely, definitive biography. Asher attributes this once-acclaimed author's truncated career to a decades-long FBI investigation into his Communist Party ties and to changing literary fashions that overshadowed Algren's achievements-foremost among them, alchemizing his observations of the mid-20th-century Chicago underclass into masterful novels such as the National Book Award-winning The Man with the Golden Arm. With vigorous, poetic detail, Asher reconstructs Algren's formative experiences of poverty during the Depression and Army service during WWII, his burst of fame during the Cold War and subsequent struggles, and his twilight years as a mentor to writers such as Don DeLillo. Along with examining important relationships in Algren's life, including his troubled marriages, friendship with Richard Wright, and long affair with Simone de Beauvoir, Asher reads Algren's work carefully and well, from his early short stories to his last project, a biography of boxer Rubin Carter. Asher relies on the primary material assembled by previous biographers, filling in the blanks with a nearly unredacted version of Algren's FBI file. The result is a generous, stylish portrait of an impulsive, directionless outsider who nonetheless established a place among the lions of mid-20th century American literature. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
"Who now reads Cowley?" Alexander Pope asked in 1737, referring to the English metaphysical poet. Who now reads Algren? Yet during his lifetime, -Nelson Algren (1909-81) was a critically acclaimed and popular writer, having won the first National Book Award (1950) for The Man with the Golden Arm; the Award of Merit for the Novel from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1974), to which he was elected; published New York Times best sellers that were made into movies; and who was praised by figures such as Ernest Hemingway and Richard Wright. In this new biography, Asher (writing, Kings-borough Community Coll., CUNY) draws on Algren's extensive FBI file (Algren joined the Communist Party in the 1930s and later protested the Vietnam War), interviews, archives, and private communications to present an accurate portrait of the author. Asher concedes the preciseness of his subject's experience is difficult because Algren fictionalized much of his life in encounters with the press, including Conversations with Nelson Algren (1964), on which other biographers have relied. VERDICT Unfortunately, extraneous material overshadows literary analysis in this otherwise well-crafted account, which nicely demonstrates the links between -Algren's writings and his adventurous life. [See Prepub Alert, 10/22/18.]--Joseph Rosenblum, Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A champion of the downtrodden and marginalized was celebrated and reviled in his own time.A fervent admirer of Nelson Algren (1909-1981), essayist Asher, a 2015/2016 fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, makes his book debut with a thoroughly researched, empathetic look at the life of the irascible, controversial writer. Drawing on sources from nearly 50 archives, including audio interviews and other material deposited by Algren's previous biographer; Algren's writings, letters, and interviews; and a "very lightly redacted" copy of Algren's 886-page FBI file, Asher aims to correct the "misunderstandings and inaccuracies" that have sullied Algren's reputation: notably, that he was an alcoholic, a "loner who burned every bridge he crossed," and a writer whose publishing problems were largely his own fault. Many of those inaccuracies derived from Conversations with Nelson Algren, published in 1964, in which Algren himself conveyed an image of "a shallower, tougher, more careless, more misogynistic, less emotional, less intellectual, and lonelier person than he had ever truly been." Although Asher tries mightily to counter that image, his findings often confirm them. Algren was certainly a hard drinker, thin-skinned, and sometimes paranoid. He "spent the first six decades of his life trying, and mostly failing, to balance a long list of competing and contradictory desires." He yearned for critical acclaim but also "the freedom to express controversial ideas." He wanted "devoted friends and the stability and comfort of a home, a wife, and children," but he could never settle down with a woman without feeling stifled, and he wanted to go out whenever and wherever he pleased. "Chasing those urges," Asher admits, "had left Nelson feeling lonely and regretful." Because of his communist sympathies, the FBI kept a file on Algren beginning in 1940, creating professional and personal obstacles. Without knowing the FBI's involvement in his career, Algren blamed his own shortcomings and became anxious and depressed. Asher chronicles Algren's marriages and affairs, especially with Simone de Beauvoir, who, much to Algren's dismay, publicized intimate details in her memoir, and he offers evenhanded readings of Algren's works.A brisk, well-documented homage. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
