For a time, Nelson Algren was America's most famous author, lauded
by the likes of Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway. Millions
bought his books. Algren's third novel, The Man with the Golden
Arm, won the first National Book Award, and Frank Sinatra starred
in the movie. But despite Algren's talent, he abandoned fiction and
fell into obscurity. The cause of his decline was never clear. Some
said he drank his talent away; others cited writer's block. The
truth, hidden in the pages of his books, is far more complicated
and tragic. Now, almost forty years after Algren's death, Colin
Asher finally captures the full, novelistic story of his life in a
magisterial biography set against mid-twentieth-century American
politics and culture. Drawing from interviews, archival
correspondence, and the most complete version of Algren's 886-page
FBI file ever released, Colin Asher portrays Algren as a dramatic
iconoclast. A member of the Communist Party in the 1930s, Algren
used his writing to humanize Chicago's underclass, while
excoriating the conservative radicalism of the McCarthy era. Asher
traces Algren's development as a thinker, his close friendship and
falling out with Richard Wright, and his famous affair with Simone
de Beauvoir. Most intriguingly, Asher uncovers the true cause of
Algren's artistic exile: a reckless creative decision that led to
increased FBI scrutiny and may have caused a mental breakdown. In
his second act, Algren was a vexing figure who hid behind a cynical
facade. He called himself a "journalist" and a "loser," though many
still considered him one of the greatest living American authors.
An inspiration to writers such as Hunter S. Thompson, Martha
Gellhorn, Jimmy Breslin, Betty Friedan, Cormac McCarthy, Don
DeLillo, Russell Banks, and Thomas Pynchon, Algren nevertheless
struggled to achieve recognition, and died just as his career was
on the verge of experiencing a renaissance. Never a Lovely So Real
offers an exquisitely detailed, engrossing portrait of a master
who, as esteemed literary critic Maxwell Geismar wrote, was capable
of suggesting "the whole contour of a human life in a few terse
pages."
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