Nelson Algren

A novel of rare genius, The Man with the Golden Arm recounts the life of Francis Majcinek, "Frankie Machine," who returned from World War II with a Purple Heart and a morphine habit....

Algren’s classic 1947 short story collection is the pure vein Algren would mine for all his subsequent novels and stories. The stories in this collection are literary triumphs that don’t fade away....

Bruno Bicek, "Lefty," is a prizefighter and small-time hood in Chicago.....

A Walk in the Wild Side has found a place in the imaginations of all generations since it first appeared. ...

Nelson Algren was a renowned writer, known for his penetrating and influential social novels such as The Man with the Golden Arm. Originally published in 1935, Somebody in Boots was Algren’s first novel, based on his experiences living in Texas during the Great Depression....

The fiction and reportage included in The Last Carousel, one of the final collections published during Nelson Algren’s lifetime, was written on ships and in ports of call around the world, and includes accounts of brothels in Vietnam and Mexico....

A boxer finds himself the targeted victim of a vindictive group in the story of one man’s battle against injustice in the dark underworld of urban America....

“You don’t write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich”, writes Nelson Algren in his only longer work of nonfiction....

Written over the course of four decades, this collection of 12 stories centers around Depression-era Texas....

Nelson Algren’s two travel writing books describe his journeys through the seamier sides of great American cities and the international social and political landscapes of the mid-1960s. Algren at Sea brings them together in one volume.....

In Entrapment and Other Writings - containing his unfinished novel and previously unpublished or uncollected stories, poems, and essays - Algren speaks to our time as few of his fellow great American writers of the 1940s and ’50s do, in part because he hasn’t yet been accepted....