cover image Algren: A Life

Algren: A Life

Mary Wisniewski. Chicago Review, $30 (348p) ISBN 978-1-61373-532-9

With this comprehensive biography, Wisniewski, award-winning journalist for the Chicago Tribune, has done sterling work toward restoring Nelson Algren (1909%E2%80%931981) to his position of prominence as a celebrated author. Ably relating Algren's life to his work; Wisniewski looks at how Algren's writing process changed over the years, and how his books took shape through introspection and painstaking revision. Algren was famously a Chicago writer, and Wisniewski reveals a man who drew from his environment, from early childhood to his years living in a Polish-American neighborhood on Chicago's Northwest Side. At home with prostitutes and ne'er-do-wells, Algren developed an edgy, gritty style of writing that was apparent as early as his debut, Somebody in Boots, and carried through to his acclaimed later novels, The Man with the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side. If that paints one picture of the man, readers will also see another in his lifelong affair with Simone de Beauvoir. Wisniewski takes the reader through the life of a complex man as emblematic of Chicago as Carl Sandburg was, and puts him back where he belongs: not just in Chicago, but in American literature. (Aug.)