Algren was born in
Detroit, Michigan, the son of Goldie (née Kalisher) and Gerson Abraham. At the age of three, he moved with his parents to
Chicago, Illinois, where they lived in a working-class, immigrant neighborhood on the
South Side. His father was the son of a
Swedish convert to
Judaism and of a
German Jewish woman, and his mother was of German Jewish descent. (She owned a candy store on the South Side.) When he was young, Algren's family lived at 7139 S. South Park Avenue (now S. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive) in the
Greater Grand Crossing section of the South Side. In his essay
Chicago: City on the Make, Algren added autobiographical details: he recalled being teased by neighborhood children after moving to Troy Street because he was a fan of the South Side
White Sox. Despite living most of his life on the North Side, Algren never changed his affiliation and remained a White Sox fan. Algren was educated in Chicago's public schools, graduated from Hibbard High School (now Roosevelt High School) and went on to study at the
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, graduating with a
Bachelor of Science in
journalism during the
Great Depression in 1931.
Literary career and marriage Algren wrote his first story, "So Help Me", in 1933, while he was in Texas working at a gas station. Before returning to Chicago, he was caught stealing a typewriter from an empty classroom at Sul Ross State University in Alpine. He boarded a train for his getaway but was apprehended and returned to Alpine. He was held in jail for nearly five months and faced a possible additional three years in prison. He was released, but the incident made a deep impression on him. It deepened his identification with outsiders, has-beens, and the general failures who later populated his fictional world. In 1935 Algren won the first of his three
O. Henry Awards for his short story, "The Brother's House." The story was first published in
Story magazine and was reprinted in an anthology of O. Henry Award winners. His first novel,
Somebody in Boots (1935), was later dismissed by Algren as primitive and politically naive, claiming he infused it with
Marxist ideas he little understood, because they were fashionable at the time. The book was unsuccessful and went out of print. Algren married Amanda Kontowicz in 1937. He had met her at a party celebrating the publication of
Somebody in Boots. They eventually would divorce and remarry before divorcing a second and final time. His second novel,
Never Come Morning (1942), was described by
Andrew O'Hagan in 2019 as "the book that really shows the Algren style in its first great flourishing." It portrays the dead-end life of a doomed young
Polish-American boxer turned criminal.
Ernest Hemingway, in a July 8, 1942, letter to his publisher
Maxwell Perkins, said of the novel: "I think it very, very good. It is as fine and good stuff to come out of Chicago." The novel offended members of Chicago's large Polish-American community, some of whose members denounced it as pro-
Axis propaganda. Not knowing that Algren was of partly Jewish descent, some incensed Polish-American Chicagoans said he was pro-
Nazi Nordic. His Polish-American critics persuaded Mayor
Edward Joseph Kelly to ban the novel from the
Chicago Public Library.
Military service Algren served as a private in the
European Theater of
World War II as a litter bearer. Despite being a college graduate, he was denied entry into Officer Candidate School. There is conjecture that it may have been due to suspicion regarding his political beliefs, but his criminal conviction would have most likely excluded him from OCS. According to Bettina Drew in her 1989 biography
Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side, Algren had no desire to serve in the war but was drafted in 1943. An indifferent soldier, he dealt on the
black market while he was stationed in France. He received a bad beating by some fellow black marketeers.
Fame , Indiana. Algren's first short-story collection,
The Neon Wilderness (1947), collected 24 stories from 1933 to 1947. The same year, Algren received an award from the
American Academy of Arts and Letters and a grant from Chicago's
Newberry Library. It was in that same year that Algren began an affair with
Simone de Beauvoir. Mary Guggenheim, who had been Algren's lover, recommended that Beauvoir visit Algren in Chicago. The couple would summer together in Algren's cottage in the lake front community of
Miller Beach, Indiana, and also travel to
Latin America together in 1949. In her novel
The Mandarins (1954), Beauvoir wrote of Algren (who is 'Lewis Brogan' in the book): At first I found it amusing meeting in the flesh that classic American species: self-made leftist writer. Now, I began taking an interest in Brogan. Through his stories, you got the feeling that he claimed no rights to life and that nevertheless he had always had a passionate desire to live. I liked that mixture of modesty and eagerness. Algren and Beauvoir eventually became disenchanted with each other, and a bitter Algren wrote of Beauvoir and her longtime companion
Jean-Paul Sartre in a
Playboy magazine article about a trip he took to
North Africa with Beauvoir, that she and Sartre were bigger users of others than a prostitute and her pimp in their way. Algren's next novel,
The Man with the Golden Arm (1949), would become his best known work. It won the
National Book Award for Fiction in 1950. The protagonist of the book, Frankie Machine, is an aspiring drummer who is a dealer in illicit card games. Frankie is trapped in
demimonde Chicago, having picked up a
morphine habit during his brief military service during
World War II. He is married to a woman whom he mistakenly believes became crippled in a car accident he caused. Algren's next book,
Chicago: City on the Make (1951), was a scathing essay that outraged the city's boosters but portrayed the back alleys of the city, its dispossessed, its corrupt politicians and its swindlers. Algren also declared his love of the city as a "lovely so real".
The Man With the Golden Arm was adapted as a
1955 movie of the same name, starring
Frank Sinatra and directed and produced by
Otto Preminger. Algren soon withdrew from direct involvement. It was a commercial success but Algren loathed the film. In the fall of 1955, Algren was interviewed for
The Paris Review by rising author
Terry Southern. Algren and Southern became friends through this meeting and remained in touch for many years. Algren became one of Southern's most enthusiastic early supporters and, when he taught creative writing in later years, he often used Southern as an example of a great short story writer. Algren had another commercial success with the novel
A Walk on the Wild Side (1956). He reworked some of the material from his first novel,
Somebody in Boots, as well as picking up elements from several published short stories, such as his 1947 "The Face on the Barroom Floor". The novel was about a wandering Texan adrift during the early years of the
Great Depression. He said it was superior to the earlier book. It was adapted as the
1962 movie of the same name. Some critics thought the film
bowdlerized the book, and it was not commercially successful.
Decline and second marriage A Walk on the Wild Side was Algren's last commercial success. He turned to teaching creative writing at the
University of Iowa's
Writers Workshop to supplement his income. In 1965, he met Betty Ann Jones while teaching at the Writers Workshop. They married that year and divorced in 1967. Algren played a small part in
Philip Kaufman's underground comedy
Fearless Frank (1967) as a mobster named Needles. In 1968, he signed the
Writers and Editors War Tax Protest pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the
Vietnam War. According to Bettina Drew's biography, Algren angled for a journalism job in
South Vietnam. Strapped for cash more than a decade after his only two commercially successful novels, he saw Vietnam as an opportunity to make money, not from journalism fees but dealing on the black market.
Hurricane Carter and Paterson, New Jersey In 1975, Algren was commissioned to write a magazine article about the trial of
Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, the prize fighter who had been found guilty of double murder. While researching the article, Algren visited Carter's hometown of
Paterson, New Jersey. Algren was instantly fascinated by the city of Paterson and he immediately decided to move there. In the summer of 1975, Algren sold off most of his belongings, left Chicago, and moved into an apartment in Paterson.
Death In 1980, Algren moved to a house in
Sag Harbor,
Long Island. He died of a heart attack at home on May 9, 1981. ==Posthumously published works==