Word: algren
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Goncourt Academy, fetched her the Goncourt Prize instead, and brought her a sale in France of 250,000 copies. Now that it is published in the U.S., it is not too hard to see why the French crowded the bookshops. The book, which is dedicated to Chicago Novelist Nelson Algren (see below), is about Paris intellectuals immediately after the liberation. Most of them are famous writers who figured in the resistance and wrote some of France's best contemporary books. What is more to the point, they are barely disguised in The Mandarins. It also gives a detailed account...
...WALK ON THE WILD SIDE (346 pp.)-Nelson Algren-Farrar, Straus & Cudahy...
...dying is the notion that prostitutes have hearts of gold and that bums are somehow more steeped in humanity than people who work. No living U.S. writer has done more to keep the idea alive, and no one has done it with more literary authority than Chicago Novelist Nelson Algren. His Man with the Golden Arm, 1949's best U.S. novel, dealt with a sordid world of petty crime and drug addiction that shocked many a queasy reader, but it was so firmly rimmed by compassion and understanding that no one could doubt its literary worth...
...amorality would excite the envy of an alley cat. Yet he vaguely wants to better himself, and knows he can never do it in his Texas home town, where his father cleans cesspools and spouts drunken fundamentalism from the courthouse steps. So Dove Linkhorn rides the rods, just as Algren himself did during the Depression, and before long he winds up in New Orleans. Almost immediately he is caught up in a surrealist country of thieves, grifters, pimps and prostitutes. Here he thrives as naturally as a trout in clean running water. For a while he works in a contraceptive...
...Algren, an honest writer, has written scenes in A Walk whose brutality and sordidness can hardly be equaled in contemporary fiction. That he means the book to be a caress for the most degraded members of society and a protest against social injustice is obvious. But in supposing that human virtue flourishes best among degenerates, Novelist Algren has dressed his sense of compassion in the rags of vulgarity...