Nelson Algren in Chicago's Literary Hall of Fame

[Jerry Peterson]

Talk to Chicago writers my age or a little younger – I have silver hair – and most will tell you they have been influenced by Nelson Algren.

Algren was 41 when he won the very first National Book Award for his novel The Man with the Golden Arm. That was in 1950. It’s a novel of drug addiction, gambling, and life and death among the people of Chicago’s Polish Downtown district. Algren lived there. He knew well the drunks, pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts, prize fighters, hoodlums, and corrupt politicians who would populate his books.

The film version of the book came out six years later with Frank Sinatra playing the lead role of card dealer and junkie Frankie Machine.

Algren followed The Man with the Golden Arm with a book-length essay, Chicago: City on the Make. He wrote about the Chicago’s back alleys and the city’s dispossessed residents, crooked politicians and swindlers.

Chicago boosters hated the book. The Tribune panned it, calling City on the Make “a highly scented object,” a polite way of saying the book stinks. Algren accused the publisher and editors of the Trib of “imposing false viewpoints on the city and promoting mediocrity.”

Algren and the Trib’s top management didn’t exactly get along. Okay, they despised one another

Ready for the surprise? Today the Tribune is an Algren booster. Annually, it sponsors the Nelson Algren short fiction contest. It published the top entries in a special section and gives the winning writer a $5,000 check.

One last Algren story.

He wrote his first story, So Help Me, at age 26. At the time – this was 1933 – he was in Texas working at a gas station. A writer has to have a typewriter. Algren didn’t have any money, so he stole one – from an abandoned school.

And he got five months in jail for it.

Critics say the experience deepened Algren’s identification with the outsiders, the has-beens, and the general failures who would come to dominate his fictional world.

No doubt it did.

Tomorrow: Meet the second of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame’s inductees – Saul Bellow

[O'Neil De Noux]

Not long ago I read a piece about Algren and Simone de Beauvoir and how their love affair that drew them through my home town, New Orleans. Hadn't realized the National Book Award winner writer of THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM also wrote the very cool New Orleans novel, A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE.