Bart Schneider
In 1953, Nelson Algren, the great Chicago author of The Man with the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side, was set to publish the extended essay that makes up the heart of this volume. But, in the midst of the McCarthy era, Algren became a named name. Doubleday forfeited his small advance and washed its hands of the book.
Now, 40-odd years later, after a decade of dogged sleuthing by publisher Daniel Simon and his associates, this splendid volume has finally been issued. The manuscript that Algren (1909-1981) left behind is a pastiche of rantings on the ethics of the modern writer, cobbled together with longish quotes from novelists Algren favored and despised. A tough-guy populist, Algren was fascinated by F. Scott Fitzgerald's moral plight and uses Fitzgerald to set the tension for this essay. "The struggle to write with profundity of emotion and at the same time to live like a millionaire," Algren writes, "so exhausted F. Scott Fitzgerald that he was at last brought down to the point where he could no longer be both a good writer and a decent person."
At times, Algren's rambling essay is closer to notebook jottings than to a meditation by Montaigne. But where else can you find such bully bursts of hyperbolic language, demanding to be read aloud? "From the penthouse suspended silently so high above the winding traffic's iron lamentation, forty straight-down stories into those long, low, night-blue bars aglow below street-level, a lonely guilt pervades us all." And who else mixes quotes from Simone de Beauvoir (the lover who broke Algren's heart) and Leo Durocher into a single essay? De Beauvoir may have stolen his heart, but Durocher's was the kind of mug Nelson saw when he looked in the mirror. What kind of advice was Algren offering writers when he provided the context for Durocher's nice-guys-finish-last riff? "Say I'm playing short and Mother is on first and the batter singles to right. Mother comes fast around second with the winning run -- Mother will have to go down. I'll help her up, dust her off and say, 'Mom, I'm sorry, but it was an accident' -- but she won't have scored."
At 16 bucks and beautifully bound -- it may be among the best coffee table books of the year -- Nonconformity is a steal, a few strokes of wonderful writing combined with an excellent bit of literary archeology. -- Salon
Kirkus Reviews
A previously unpublished work from the author of The Man With the Golden Arm and other masterful portraits of the seamy underside of urban America.
This volume, essentially a lengthy essay in book form, was written by Algren in the early 1950s, at the peak of his fame and the height of the McCarthy era. At the time, his lengthy affair with Simone de Beauvoir was coming to an unhappy end and he was throwing himself into the public arena in reaction to that private pain. Nonconformity shows its origins in those multiple traumas. Opening with a brief and mournful recollection of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "crack-up," Algren jumps into a passionate defense of the writer as someone who must live out the emotions of his characters, no easy thing in an era in which all the forces of the state and the market seem to be calculated to produce conformist writing that commits nothing, dares nothing, and achieves nothing. It is a time, he writes repeatedly, in which Americans are caught "between the H bomb and the A," with the threat of internal destruction greater than any threat from the so-called Red Menace. At such a time, Algren says defiantly, a writer's attitude to his readers should be "this ain't what you rung for, Jack—but it's what you're damned well getting." That's certainly the mind-set that dominated Algren's best writing. The afterword and notes by Simon are useful, placing the essay in a larger biographical and historical context. However, the editor's claim that this is "Algren's only book-length work of non-fiction" is dubious; Algren also turned out two substantial travel books and an essay of similar length on his native Chicago, each of them filled with thesame corrosive writing on the American scene. That said, this is a typically refreshing breath of cigarette-smoke-filled air from one of our most underrated writers, angry and funny as Algren usually is.
From the Publisher
A handbook for tough, truth-telling outsiders who are proud, as was Algren, to damn well stay that way.” –Kurt Vonnegut
“In the never-before-published, book-length essay Nonconformity … [Algren] articulates an American literary world view that should guide the generations of writers to follow him—a quest so ambitious it is hard to think of any other American writer who attempted it since, perhaps, Ralph Waldo Emerson in Self-Reliance.” –Gerald Nicosia, Chicago Sun-Times
“A passionate defense of the writer … Angry and funny as Algren usually is.” –Kirkus Reviews
“This extended essay on what it takes to be a writer—and by extension a man—provides a corrosive antidote to any fin de siecle sentimentalizing of the American midcentury.” –The Boston Globe
“Nonconformity underscores the beliefs of Algren, Dreiser and an army of intellectuals that it is the duty of the serious writer to serve as society's moral conscience … Simon has done a great service in bringing this book into print.” –Bettina Drew, Chicago Tribune
“Wise, courageous and humane.” –Publishers Weekly
