Word: algren
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...first glance one might assume that Nelson Algren has approached Chicago as E B White looked at New York a couple of years ago. Indeed, the superficial comparisons are obvious as soon as White's. "This is New York" and the Algren work are placed side by side...
Both are short less than 100 pages--and the same size and shape. Further, both works are in essay form and appeared in magazines prior to publication as volumes. But they are as different as the two cities they deal with. Where White was soft, Algren is hard; where the former wrote quietly, lightly, and as a New Yorker, Algren speaks loudly and unhappily, and beneath his smooth flow of prose there is violent opinion...
Readers may remember the author's widely read "Man With the Golden Arm." It depicted carefully and correctly the Chicago of bums, rummies, winoes, the world of the Near North Side. Algren has this Chicago heavily on his mind in his latest work: the city of Hinky Dink Kenna, the Capone gang, and the Black Sox. His poetic description of the town and his reactions to it hangs largely about the wrong side of Michigan Boulevard...
...subject, Tomboy is no great shakes as a novel. Its surface action is credible enough, but when Therapist-Novelist Ellson tries to explain what makes his little hoodlums run, he is much too pat and predictable. Unlike such other slum novelists as James T. Farrell (Studs Lonigan) and Nelson Algren (The Man with the Golden Arm), he lacks the gift for individualizing his miniature mobsters and thereby arousing sympathy for them. The chances are that Ellson, who is a better reporter than novelist, would have done just as well to turn his notes into a straight, big-city documentary...
Honored at the first annual National Book Award dinner in Manhattan, for books which the U.S. publishing trade voted the most distinguished U.S. fiction, non-fiction and poetry of 1949: Novelist Nelson Algren, 40, of Chicago, for The Man with the Golden Arm; Biographer Dr. Ralph L Rusk, 61, of Manhattan, for The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson; Dr. William Carlos Williams, 66, pediatrician-poet of Rutherford, N.J., for two books of verse, Paterson, Book III and Selected Poems...