Nelson Algren Biography


ph_0111201172-Algren.jpg Nelson Algren. Published by Salem Press, Inc.

Born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham in Detroit, Michigan, on March 28, 1909, Nelson Algren is usually identified with Chicago, where his family moved in 1913. His mother, Goldie, was an ill-tempered, violent woman, and his uncouth father, Gerson, a mechanic, was an often remote presence. The emotionally insecure Algren preferred to identify with the wandering grandfather he never met, Nels Ahlgren, a Swedish convert to Judaism. A normal middle-class boy in most respects, Algren began frequenting pool halls, speakeasies, and gambling dens as a teenager.

Algren’s strongest family bond was with Bernice, the younger of two older sisters. It was she who encouraged his literary interests and insisted he attend college, and her death in 1940 left a space no one ever filled. Socially aloof, Algren discovered his love of books at the University of Illinois, Urbana, and led an ascetic and “spiritual” life of study, with the occasional lapse. In college, he wrote stories which demonstrate his identification with the oppressed—an identification that his experiences on the road would deepen. In 1931, with a degree in journalism, he went in search of a job that was not to be had during the Great Depression. Taking up the hobo’s life, he traveled to New Orleans, which, together with Chicago, was one of the two major cities of his fiction. There he was a door-to-door salesman before accompanying two drifters to Texas, where he became involved in an ill-fated scheme to run a gas station and later worked at a carnival.

After further travels, gathering experiences that he would turn into fiction, Algren returned home, joined a writers’ group, and started submitting stories using Nelson Algren as his pen name (only changing it legally during World War II). Politically radical, he frequented the John Reed Club, a Communist Party organization, and met writers such as Richard Wright, the future author of Native Son (1940). Over the years, he would have close ties with the Communist Party, but it is not certain that he was ever a member.

After several rejections, he was published by Story and A Year in 1933. When Vanguard Press paid him an advance for a novel, Algren, who always wrote best from immediate experience, went back on the road. In Alpine, Texas, he spent almost a month in jail for stealing a typewriter from the local community college. Though his stories and reporting enhanced his reputation, Algren was devastated when Somebody in Boots (1935) was not a success. Despite favorable reviews, the novel...

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Termed “bard of the stumblebum” and “poet of the Chicago slums,” Algren combined an idiosyncratic style and a keen eye for detail in his compelling depictions of the dispossessed. Convinced that “lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives,” Algren created characters dignified even in defeat.


Born in Detroit, the descendant of Nels Ahlgren, a Swedish Jew who changed his name to Isaac ben Abraham, Nelson Algren was brought up under the “El” on Chicago’s poor West Side and was the “bard of the stumblebum” of the Polish community there in the Depression. He took a degree in journalism at the University of Illinois but found it difficult to get a job after graduating. He drifted to the South and to Texas, where he wrote his first short story, “So Help Me,” in an abandoned filling station outside Rio Hondo. This story led to his first novel, Somebody in Boots (1935). Algren’s novel The Man with the Golden Arm reached the top of the best-seller list. He also received praise for his 1956...

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Nelson Algren was born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham in Detroit, Michigan, on March 28, 1909, to second-generation Chicagoans; the family moved back to Chicago when Algren was three years old. From 1912 until 1928, Algren absorbed the Chicago environment that was to become the center of his fictional world. After receiving his journalism degree from the University of Illinois in 1931, he began traveling across the Southwest, working at odd jobs (door-to-door coffee salesman in New Orleans, migrant worker, co-operator of a gasoline station in Texas, and carnival worker) and gathering the raw material that he later transformed into his fiction, particularly A Walk on the Wild Side. After serving time for stealing a typewriter (an...

(The entire section is 338 words.)