Nelson Algren

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 Algren's beloved Chicago White Sox, among other subjects. In this collection, not just Algren's intensity but his diversity are revealed and celebrated.

The struggle to write with deep emotion is the subject of this extraordinary book, the previously unpublished credo of one of America's greatest 20th-century writers.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 in his only longer work of nonfiction, adding: "A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is...

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 appraisals of Ernest Hemingway ever written. Aboard the freighter Malaysia Mail, Algren ponders his personal encounter with Hemingway in Cuba and the values...

The struggle to write with deep emotion is the subject of this extraordinary book, the previously unpublished credo of one of America's greatest twentieth-century writers.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 in his only longer work of nonfiction, adding: "A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as...

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 idiosyncratic, bedevilled, cantankerously poetic sensibility that would see him ranked among the few literary originals of his times." Algren's classic 1947 short story...

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 Depression. A wonderful companion to Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, this new edition of Somebody in Boots features an introduction by Colin Asher, who is writing...

"With its depictions of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, A Walk on the Wild Side found a place in the imaginations of all the generations that have followed since." "Perhaps his own words describe the book best: "The book asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives. Why men who have suffered...

Reminiscences of walks taken by the author, through the wild sides of the ports of Pusan, Kowloon, Bombay and Calcutta; including a critical study of Hemingway.

An ex-convict recovering from heroin addiction returns to the Chicago slums and struggles to become a musician.

An ex-convict recovering from heroin addiction returns to the Chicago slums and struggles to become a musician.