Nelson Algren

The struggle to write with deep emotion is the subject of this extraordinary book, the previously unpublished credo of one of America’s greatest 20th-century writers.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 sought humanity in the urban wilderness of postwar America, where his powerful voice rose from behind the billboards and down tin-can alleys, from among the marginalized and ignored, the outcasts and scapegoats, the punks and junkies, the whores and down-on-their luck gamblers, the...

Nelson Algren’s two travel writing books describe his journeys through the seamier sides of great American cities and the international social and political landscapes of the mid-1960s. Algren at Sea brings them together in one volume. Notes from a Sea Diary offers one of the most remarkable...

A boxer finds himself the targeted victim of a vindictive group in the story of one man’s battle against injustice in the dark underworld of urban America. 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...

As rock and roll novelist Tom Carson writes in his introduction, “The Neon Wilderness is the pivotal book of Nelson Algren’s career - the one which bid a subdued but determined farewell to everything that had earlier made him no more than just another good writer, and inaugurated the...

Nelson Algren was a renowned writer, known for his penetrating and influential social novels such as The Man with the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side. Originally published in 1935, Somebody in Boots was Algren’s first novel, based on his experiences living in Texas during the Great...

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...