An American Nightmare - The US versus Nelson Algren

Reassessing a lost legend:

Nelson Algren had it all. A bestselling novelist, he was critically acclaimed for his edgy and urban exposes of the age's underworld and had the Hollywood studios knocking at the door. Yet just a decade later, he stood at the brink of madness and suicide, shunned by associates, blacklisted by publishers and washed up as a major author. It's arguably the most precipitous decline of any modern writer but how did it happen and how did history resurrect the poet laureate of life on the skids?

When he released the killer combination of Never Come Morning, The Man With The Golden Arm and Walk On The Wild Side in the late forties, it seemed to herald Algren as a major creative force in American literature. So successfully did he recreate the lives lived amidst the flophouses, speakeasies, drunktanks, whorehouses and shooting galleries, that those very terms have become utterly synonymous with the writer. Though he had mixed feelings about the film version of his junkie tale The Man with the Golden Arm (featuring ol' blue eyes himself), it was a crucial breakthrough in cinema history, injecting (excuse the pun) a new and vital realism to a world that had been traditionally treated as cartoonish, crass and neurotic (see Reefer Madness). Hubert Selby Jnr, Tarantino, Frank Miller's Sin City and a thousand other chroniclers of scuzzballs, lowlifes and grafters would no doubt acknowledge their debt to the man.