Word: algren
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Carefully furthering his foaming reputation as the wild man of U.S. letters, Chicago's seamy-side Novelist Nelson (A Walk on the Wild Side) Algren avidly snapped at some old-bone subjects dangled before him in Manhattan by a World-Telegram and Sunman. Of his erstwhile great and good friend, French Authoress Simone de Beauvoir, who unwarily dedicated her latest existentialist idyl, The Mandarins, to Algren: "A good female novelist ought to have enough to write about without digging up her own private garden. For me, it was just a routine relationship, and she's blown...
Novelist Nelson Algren, according to TIME, May 28, is convinced that "Skid Row makes the choicest book fodder." Does it? Am I the only one who is weary of problem novels about problem people and of stories that suggest fun and games are to be had only extramaritally ? Mr. Algren would refuse to attend the wedding of Marjorie Morningstar to The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Why should I have to officiate at the agonies of his Man with the Golden...
...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...