Nelson Algren Books In Order

Novels

  1. Somebody in Boots (1935)
  2. Never Come Morning (1942)
  3. The Man with the Golden Arm (1949)
  4. A Walk on the Wild Side (1956)
  5. The Devil’s Stocking (1983)

Collections

  1. The Neon Wilderness (1947)
  2. The Last Carousel (1973)
  3. The Texas Stories of Nelson Algren (1995)

Picture Books

  1. He Swung and He Missed (1993)

Non fiction

  1. Nonconformity (1995)
  2. Conversations with Nelson Algren (2001)

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Nelson Algren Books Overview

Never Come Morning

Bruno Bicek, Lefty, is a prizefighter and small time hood in Chicago. Boxing is his ticket to escape hard times and gang life, but when Bruno doesn’t prevent the brutal gang rape of his girlfriend, Steffi, it tears them apart, their worlds changed forever. Bruno is sent to jail and Steffi to a brothel governed by the brutality of a local crime boss, The Barber. Sinister and dark, The Barber controls Steffi and has no intention of letting her go. Why should he, when he holds all the cards? Bruno and Steffi, who dream of breaking free, learn this in the end and find that for them there will be no bright morning.

The Man with the Golden Arm

The Man with the Golden Arm is Nelson Algren’s most powerful and enduring work. On the 50th anniversary of its publication in November 1949, for which Algren was honored with the first National Book Award which he received from none other than Eleanor Roosevelt at a ceremony in March 1950, Seven Stories is proud to release the first critical edition of an Algren work.A novel of rare genius, The Man with the Golden Arm describes the dissolution of a card dealing WWII veteran named Frankie Machine, caught in the act of slowly cutting his own heart into wafer thin slices. For Frankie, a murder committed may be the least of his problems. The literary critic Malcolm Cowley called The Man with the Golden Arm ‘Algren’s defense of the individual,’ while Carl Sandburg wrote of its ‘strange midnight dignity.’ A literary tour de force, here is a novel unlike any other, one in which drug addiction, poverty, and human failure somehow suggest a defense of human dignity and a reason for hope. Special contributions by Russell Banks, Bettina Drew, James R. Giles, Carlo Rotella, William Savage, Lee Stringer, Studs Terkel, Kurt Vonnegut, and others.

A Walk on the Wild Side

With its depictions of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, A Walk in the Wild Side has found a place in the imaginations of all generations since it first appeared. As Algren admitted, the book ‘wasn’t written until long after it had been walked…
I found my way to the streets on the other side of the Southern Pacific station, where the big jukes were singing something called ‘Walking the Wild Side of Life.’ I’ve stayed pretty much on that side of the curb ever since.’Perhaps the author’s own words describe this classic work best: ‘The book asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives. Why men who have suffered at the hands of other men are the natural believers in humanity, while those whose part has been simply to acquire, to take all and give nothing, are the most contemptuous of mankind.’

The Devil’s Stocking

This is a man writing and you should not read it if you cannot take a punch…
. Mr. Algren, boy, you are good. Ernest Hemingway Algren is an artist whose sympathy is as large as Victor Hugo s, an artist who ranks…
among our best American authors. Chicago Sun Times The Devil’s Stocking is clearly vintage Algren…
. He seems not to have aged but only matured and to be, as never before, in firm possession of his subject. His language throughout the novel is precise, controlled, almost entirely free of the lush lyrical excesses of the past, but nonetheless genuinely warm and alive. The story is recognizable as belonging in the classic Algren repertoire, yet is also freshly conceived and carried forward with an easy assurance that indicates Algren had it in him to write five or six more novels in the same vein. The New York Times Book Review The Devil s Stocking is the story of Ruby Calhoun, a boxer accused of murder in a shadowy world of low purse fighters, cops, con artists, and bar girls. Chronicling a battle for truth and human dignity that gives way to a larger story of life and death decisions, literary grandmaster Nelson Algren s last novel is a fitting capstone to a long and brilliant career. Nelson Algren 1909 1981 wrote of the despised urban underbelly of America before it was fashionable to do so and still stands as one of our most defiant and enduring novelists. His novels include The Man with the Golden Arm winner of the first National Book Award, A Walk on the Wild Side, and Never Come Morning.

The Neon Wilderness

The stories in The Neon Wilderness established Algren in the pantheon of American writers and formed the vein that he mined for all his subsequent novels and stories. Included are ‘A Bottle of Milk for Mother,’ about a youth being cornered for a murder, ‘The Face on the Barroom Floor,’ in which a legless man nearly pummels someone to death, and ‘So Help Me,’ Algren’s first published story. ‘Algren s short stories are now generally acknowledged to be literary triumphs.’ The New York Times

The Last Carousel

The fiction and reportage included in The Last Carousel, one of the final collections published during Nelson Algren’s lifetime, was written on ships and in ports of call around the world, and includes accounts of brothels in Vietnam and Mexico, stories of the boxing ring, and reminiscences of Algren’s beloved Chicago White Sox, among other subjects. In this collection, not just Algren’s intensity but his diversity are revealed and celebrated.

Nonconformity

The struggle to write with deep emotion is the subject of this extraordinary book, the previously unpublished credo of one of America’s greatest 20th century writers.’You don’t write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich,’ writes Nelson Algren in his only longer work of nonfiction, adding: ‘A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.’Nonconformity is about 20th century America: ‘Never on the earth of man has he lived so tidily as here amidst such psychological disorder.’ And it is about the trouble writers ask for when they try to describe America: ‘Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards…
where there are still…
defeats in which everything is lost and victories that fall close enough to the heart to afford living hope.’In Nonconformity, Algren identifies the essential nature of the writer’s relation to society, drawing examples from Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Twain, and Fitzgerald, as well as utility infielder Leo Durocher and legendary barkeep Martin Dooley. He shares his deepest beliefs about the state of literature and its role in society, along the way painting a chilling portrait of the early 1950s, Joe McCarthy’s heyday, when many American writers were blacklisted and ruined for saying similar things to what Algren is saying here.

Conversations with Nelson Algren

In these frank and often devastating conversations Nelson Algren reveals himself with all the gruff humor, deflating insight, honesty, and critical brilliance that marked his career. Prodded by H. E. F. Donohue, Algren discusses everything from his childhood to his compulsion to write to his relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. The result is a masterful portrait of a rebel and a major American writer.

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