Nelson Algren Hits the Big 100

Posted by Meg Nola Mar 28, 2009

Chicago author Nelson Algren would have marked a 100th birthday on March 28th, if he hadn't left our sphere in 1981 after suffering a heart attack. Though Algren was born in Detroit, his family moved to Chicago when he was a child and he would be emotionally and artistically linked with the city for the rest of his life. He did abandon Chicago for the East Coast in his later years, feeling that he wasn’t appreciated by his hometown despite the fame he had achieved through publication of such novels as The Man with the Golden Arm and Never Come Morning. Apparently at the time he left you could barely find his books in the Chicago Public Library, though they are certainly there now.

Algren was streetwise yet poetic, turning blighted urban views into hauntingly beautiful scenes. He could also peer into the soul of a desperate man or woman and find a whole range of experiences and emotions -- and what had led them to turn to the needle or the bottle, or to a life of crime. He wasn’t much of a schmoozer and called things as he saw them, which often led to his disenfranchisement from the literati of his day. He had a long-time affair with French writer Simone de Beauvoir, but that ended with a bittersweet (usually more bitter than sweet) resentment much like his departure from Chicago.

Reading Nelson Algren’s works is a great way to learn about the man and the Chicago neighborhood in which he found his writing “zone,” that being the then-predominantly Polish area called The Triangle. Algren wouldn’t recognize much of his gentrified, hipped-up Triangle now, but a fine way to go back in time beyond reading Algren’s fiction is to check out the movie Call Northside 777. The film is based on a real case of a Chicago man sent to prison for a murder he didn’t commit. It has an unusually low-key tone for a 1948 film, with an unusually low-key Jimmy Stewart playing a reporter unraveling errors of justice. And beyond that, Call Northside 777 offers a wonderful cinematic window into some of the bars, streets, and people of the Triangle area, truly bringing Algren’s words to life.

"...old-world markets and mid-American saloons, murmurous with poverty...bound by the laced steel of the railroads and the curved steel of the El." (Nelson Algren, Never Come Morning)