The hour would appear to be right for the resurrection of Nelson Algren (1909–1981), who had been Chicago's premier novelist several years before Saul Bellow rose to eminence, and who made his reputation as the arch-poet of destitution and degradation, the principal mourner and celebrant of whoredom, pimpery, grifting, drug addiction, and deadly street brawling. The pathos of lumpenproletarian misery has never gone entirely out of artistic fashion, but its status has been enhanced recently by the vogue for socialism and the ever-growing hatred for the undeserving rich. Accordingly, Colin Asher expresses the hope that his new life of Algren will move people to “seek out his best work and read it in the same spirit in which it was read when it was published: a time when critics compared Algren to Dostoyevsky, Dickens, and Sandburg, and said his books deserved to be ‘read, remembered, and admired'; . . . and when his stories were celebrated for their ability to convey ‘the dramatic sense of right against wrong and everkindled hopefulness.'”
He was born Nelson Algren Abraham, and everything about his parents dismayed him. Gerson Abraham owned a garage where he repaired flat tires for a living, and his son, wised-up young, despised him for his lack of common sense and especially for refusing to believe that Chicago policemen took bribes.
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