Nelson Algren

Nelson Algren. Writer. Between the curved steel of the El and the nearest Clark Street hockshop, between the penny arcade and the shooting gallery, between the basement ginmill and the biggest juke in Bronzeville, the prairie is caught for keeps at last. , Nelsen Algren, from Chicago: City on the Make , , Nelson Algren's fiction is celebrated for its realism and street-smart lyricism. His sympathetically portrayed characters often are young urban men who struggle against prejudice. , , Part poet and part reporter, Algren wrote about the American Dream gone awry. His books include Never Come Morning, A Walk on the Wild Side, Chicago: City on the Make, and Neon Wilderness. His National Book Award-winning The Man with the Golden Arm was a realistic depiction of heroin addiction that was later made into a popular movie. , , Algren grew up in a poor Polish neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. After studying journalism, he worked a variety of jobs during the Depression before joining the Federal Workers Project in the late 1930s and serving in the Army from 1942-45. He traveled throughout the Southwest before finally settling again in Chicago. , , Algren lived on the third floor here at 1958 West Evergreen Street for almost two decades. Many of his subjects came from this neighborhood, and he entertained many prominent writers of the day in his haunts on Division Street and Damen and Milwaukee Avenues. His affair with the French writer and intellectual Simone de Beauvoir was fictionalized in her novel The Mandarins. , , Both the international writers guild PEN and the Chicago Tribune have fiction contests in Algren's name. ,