Chicago, that [broken] city. . .

I finished the Nelson Algren biography, a wonderful book. Algren's life was not presented as one in which he had to share Chicago only with Richard Wright, who left, or Saul Bellow, who mainly stayed but also left. Simone de Beauvoir figures prominently in the narrative, as does Algren's entanglement with federal authorities over his involvement with the Communist movement as a young man. The Guardian and The Chicago Sun-Times present news of the day which would fit the Depression-era 1930s when Algren and Wright first became acquainted in the Windy City.

Also, I stumbled upon a blogger who connected Algren's writing with Bukowski's, no doubt because they both so often chose downtrodden misfits and outcasts as their subjects although with Bukowski, he is much more evidently writing about himself through his alter-ego Henry Chinaski. Algren would be the more richly descriptive writer, but Bukowski seems to be the one who has lasted as far as book sales and cultural memory are concerned.

there were so few left

"Nelson [Algren] felt even more isolated among his own generation of radicals because there were so few left. Richard Wright was dead, and no one had heard from Abe Aaron in more than twenty years. Jack Conroy, whom Nelson wasn't speaking to, had retired and returned to Moberly, Missouri, and everyone else had either joined him in obscurity or switched sides. John Dos Passos, one of the most important left-wing writers of the thirties, had become a conservative and a Richard Nixon supporter. John Steinbeck had recently traveled to Vietnam and sent back dispatches praising the war effort. Even Frank Meyer--the Communist Party functionary who scolded Nelson for lacking discipline in 1940--had become a contributor to the National Review and a close friend of William F. Buckley's."

~~ from Colin Asher's Never A Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren

"other writers can't help you with writing"

"Well, I dunno, I do have the feeling that other writers can't help you with writing," [Nelson] Algren said. "I've gone to writers' conferences and writers' sessions and writers' clinics, and the more I see of them, the more I'm sure it's the wrong direction. It isn't the place where you learn to write. I've always felt strongly that a writer shouldn't be engaged with other writers, or with people who make books, or even with people who read them. I think the farther away you get from literary traffic, the closer you are to sources. I mean, a writer doesn't really live. He observes."

~~ from Colin Asher's Never A Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren

Hemingway on Algren

"OK, kid, you beat Dostoyevsky. I'll never fight you in Chicago. Ever."

According to Colin Asher's Never A Lovely So Real, Ernest Hemingway wrote the praise above inside his personal copy of The Man With the Golden Arm.

Nelson Algren

The new Nelson Algren biography is a pleasure. . . lots of Richard Wright in there,  Hem cameo, the 1930s in general. . . I just found it randomly at the  library. Algren's wife just left.  https://t.co/0mA0VLAW56 #20th #Century #American #Literature #Great #Depression

— Alex Kudera (@kudera) June 10, 2019