Chicago by Nelson Algren
Once you've become a part of this particular patch, you'll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.
Ernest Hemingway once said of Nelson Algren's writing that you should not read it if you cannot take a punch. The prose poem, Chicago: City on the Make, filled with language that swings and jabs and stuns, lives up to those words. In this sixtieth anniversary edition, Algren presents 120 years of Chicago history through the lens of its nobodies nobody knows the tramps, hustlers, aging bar fighters, freed death-row inmates, and anonymous working stiffs who prowl its streets. Upon its original publication in 1951, Algren's Chicago: City on the Make was scorned by the Chicago Chamber of Commerce and local journalists for its gritty portrayal of the city and its people, one that boldly defied City Hall's business and tourism initiatives. Yet the book captures the essential dilemma of Chicago: the dynamic tension between the city's breathtaking beauty and its utter brutality, its boundless human energy and its stifling greed and violence. The sixtieth anniversary edition features historic Chicago photos and annotations on everything from defunct slang to Chicagoans, famous and obscure, to what the Black Sox scandal was and why it mattered. More accessible than ever, this is, as Studs Terkel says, the best book about Chicago.NELSON ALGREN (1909-1981), one of the most underappreciated and well-liked modern American authors, believed that literature is created whenever the legal apparatus is challenged by conscience in touch with humanity. Such belief is supported by his extensive amount of work. Algren's powerful voice sprang from the postwar urban wilderness of Chicago, and he returned again and again to that city of hustlers, junkies, and scamps, eventually bringing Chicago's deeper depths onto a stage for the entire world to see. Algren is one of our most stubborn and enduring novels, having won the inaugural National Book Award for fiction and being praised by Hemingway as one of America's two best authors. Five major novels, two collections of short fiction, a book-length poetry, and several collections of reportage are among his works. Algren died on May 9, 1981, just days after being named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was an inspiration to artists such as Kurt Vonnegut and Donald Barthelme, Studs Terkel and Lou Reed.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780226013862 |
| ISBN 10 | 0226013863 |
| Title | Chicago |
| Author | Nelson Algren |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | The University of Chicago Press |
| Year published | 2011-10-15 |
| Number of pages | 152 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |