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Nelson Algren (March 28, 1909 - May 9, 1981) was a legendary American writer.

Born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham in Detroit, Michigan, Algren moved to Chicago, Illinois with his parents at the age of three to live in a working-class, immigrant neighborhood on the South Side. His mother owned a candy store. His father was the son of a Swedish convert to Judaism.

He was educated in Chicago's public schools and went on to study journalism at the University of Illinois, from which he graduated in 1931, during the Great Depression. He wrote his first story, "So Help Me," in 1933, while he was in Texas working a patrolman's job. Before returning home, he was caught stealing a typewriter from an abandoned classroom. For this, he spent a month behind bars and faced a possible three additional years in jail. Fortunately for him, Algren was released, but the incident made a deep impression on him. It deepened his identification with outsiders, has-beens, and the general failures who later populated his fictional world.

His first novel, Somebody in Boots, was published in 1935. Never Come Morning, published in 1942, portrayed the dead-end life of a doomed young criminal.

He served as a private in the European Theater of WWII, as a litter bearer. Despite being a college graduate, he was denied entry into Officer Candidate School. There is conjecture that this may have been due to suspicion regarding Algren's political beliefs.

He articulated the world of "drunks, pimps, prostitutes, freaks, drug addicts, prize fighters, corrupt politicians, and hoodlums". He is probably best known for his 1950 National Book Award winning The Man with the Golden Arm. His next book, Chicago, City on the Make (1951) was an scathing essay that outraged the city's boosters but beautifully presented the back alleys of the town, its dispossessed, its corrupt politicians and its swindlers. Nonconformity, published in 1994, presents Algren's side of the debacle which was the 1956 film adaptation of "Golden Arm." Nonconformity also expresses the belief system behind Algren's writing not to mention a call to writers everywhere to investigate the dark and represent the ignored.

Algren had a storied affair with Simone de Beauvoir and they travelled to Latin America together in 1949. De Beauvoir said of Algren:

"At first I found it amusing meeting in the flesh that classic American species: self-made leftist writer. Now, I began taking an interest in Brogan. Through his stories, you got the feeling that he claimed no rights to life and that nevertheless he had always had a passionate desire to live. I liked that mixture of modesty and eagerness." (Simone de Beauvoir in The Mandarins, 1957; dedicated to Nelson Algren, who is Lewis Brogan in the novel).

According to Herbert Mitgang, the FBI did not like Algren's political views and kept a dossier on him amounting to more than 500 pages. Not that the Bureau ever found anything concretely subversive; it was just a result of typical FBI paranoia. (Mitgang, Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest Authors, NY: Donald I. Fine, Inc. 1988.)

Bibliography

• Somebody in Boots (1935)
• Never Come Morning (1942)
• The Neon Wilderness (1947)
• The Man with the Golden Arm (1949), concerns morphine addiction
• Chicago, City on the Make (1951)
• A Walk on the Wild Side (1956)
• Nelson Algren's Own Book of Lonesome Monsters (1962)
• Who Lost an American? (1963)
• Conversations with Nelson Algren (1964)
• The Last Carousel (1973)
• The Devil's Stocking (1983)
• America Eats (1992)
• He Swung and He Missed (1993)
• Nonconformity (1994)
• The Texas Stories of Nelson Algren (1994)

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