Word: algren
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Nelson Algren, 45, wrote a successful novel five years ago called The Man with the Golden Arm, and now lives in a bungalow outside Chicago. While working on another book, Algren is living on a publisher's advance doled out to him at the rate of $100 a week. "Of the $400 a month," he explains, "my agent gets 40 bucks. I give my mother a hundred. So on $260 a month, I keep a house, a wife, a cat and a car. Don't underrate...
...wife's, so it's got to have the best liver-about $25 worth a month." If the advance is not enough, there is the $2-limit poker session that Algren convenes twice a week in the basement of a North Michigan Avenue mansion. Algren figures that he has made $1,000 at poker this year-enough, in a pinch, to keep the novel going...
...Boyle, Irwin Shaw, in civilized coughs of irony. The bulk of the book consists of honest, strongly felt stories by authors who have profited from the example of such pioneers as Anderson and Hemingway, but have had enough intelligence and drive to cut their own paths. Stories by Nelson Algren, Erskine Caldwell, Paul Horgan, Albert Maltz, Jean Stafford and Wallace Stegner deal with such basic human situations as the feelings of parents as they take a dead baby to the cemetery, the comic tangle of a farm hand who gets into trouble while courting, the pain of a girl recuperating...
Someone who knows nothing at all about Chicago will still find that Algren's ability to produce visual image in every paragraph makes this an interesting work. At the same time that reader will find parts of the book completely unintelligible; he will not know who Algren is talking about, what incidents are involved, or even when it all took place. For Algren has criss-crossed his pages with symbols, quick references and innuendo about things only a resident of Chicago and reader of its newspapers could really appreciate...
...Algren is depressed at what he sees in his Chicago: "Out of the Twisted Twenties flowered the promise of Chicago as a homeland and heartland of an American renaissance...Thirty years later we stand on the rim of a cultural Sahara...The giants cannot come again." And he jams a good deal of depression into this short work...