Algren in the Telegraph

The Telegraph has a profile of Nelson Algren, focusing on his novel A Walk on the Wild Side--its origins, its commercial and critical failure, and its devastating impact on the rest of his life. I only read the book once and apparently it didn't make much of an impression on me, other than that I didn't enjoy it anywhere near as much as his Chicago novels The Man With The Golden Arm and Never Come Morning, the brilliant story collection The Neon Wilderness or the book-length essay Chicago: City On The Make. (Possibly my Chicago bias at work, as Wild Side is set primarily in New Orleans.) Very interesting article, regardless of the book's merits.

Consistently overlooked in the Algren canon is Nonconformity of which the Telegraph article relates:

In September 1953 Algren's publisher Doubleday refused to publish a short non-fiction book he had written that in part attacked McCarthyism, an extraordinary act given Algren was one of the best known and most popular writers in America at the time.

That book - not published until more than a quarter of a century later, as Noncomformity - is an indictment of the American project from a position inescapably American in its humour, references and language. It is both the final manifestation of the lost voices of a different America - the America of Whitman, Twain and Fitzgerald - and a text that speaks to the future by reminding readers of an indigenous tradition of American radicalism founded in the experience of the dispossessed.

(Hmmm...there's that confounded Doubleday again, taking another brave stand.) Coincidentally, I'm giving Nonconformity a casual re-reading at the moment. I'll post more impressions of it here if any particularly good ones come to mind.

As an aside, I'm comforted by this thought from the article:

"A writer who knows what he is doing," he once said, "isn't doing very much."

As a writer, I really have no idea what the hell I'm doing. So I hope that means I'm doing a lot.