Never a Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren

by Colin Asher

Overview

“Easily the best biography of the great Nelson Algren, and an extraordinary book in its own right.” —Blake Bailey, author of Cheever: A Life

For a time, Nelson Algren was America’s most famous author, lauded by the likes of Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway. But at the height of his career, he abandoned fiction and fell into obscurity. Colin Asher’s sublime biography of Algren unravels the enigma of his disappearance, explores the richness of his novels and nonfiction writing, and explains how a rash creative decision may have led his enemies to denounce him to the FBI during the Red Scare. Asher tells Algren’s story in rich, novelistic detail, including his long-term affair with Simone de Beauvoir and the emotional breakdown that nearly cost him his life. Drawing from interviews, archival correspondence, and Algren’s 886-page FBI file, Never a Lovely So Real portrays Algren as a dramatic iconoclast and reclaims him as a towering literary figure.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393357899
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/28/2020
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	560
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Colin Asher is an award-winning writer whose work has been featured in the Believer, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle. An instructor at CUNY, he was a 2015/2016 Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography.

Table of Contents

Introduction xi

I Becoming Someone is a Solitary Process

The Story of Isaac 3

Between St. Columbanus and the Wrought-Iron Gale of Oak Woods Cemetery 18

"Tell Your Tire Troubles to Nelson Abraham" 35

Stoic. Academic. Ink-Stained Wretch. 47

The Past Receded Like a Wave Just Spent 58

"So Help Me" 77

"What Is a Carpenter without His Tools?" 93

Somebody in Boots 98

The Crack Up 115

II The Chicago School

Two Forlorn Children 125

Trotskyists, Council Communists, and Mattickites 132

At Home in Rat Alley 144

Morning 164

"Do It the Hard Way" 186

The Anonymous Man 192

III Every Day is D-Day Under the EL

Exploring the Neon Wilderness 207

A Boy from the Provinces 223

Exile? 241

"OK, Kid, You Beat Dostoyevsky" 266

"How Long Docs This Sort of Thing Go On?" 286

Nonconformity 302

"Riding Day-Coaches to Nowhere" 323

"They Don't Exactly Give Me Any Medals for Caution" 343

A Walk on the Wild Side 354

A Lightless Cave off a Loveless Hall 366

IV Wander Years

"No, No Novel" 379

A Character Named Nelson Algren 395

Sea Diary 410

"On the Ho Chi Minh Trail" 420

The Last Carousel 437

"The Sanest Man I've Ever Met" 448

V Exile

Paterson, New Jersey 459

The Devil's Stocking 469

"The End Is Nothing, the Road Is All" 478

Afterword 485

Acknowledgments 489

Notes 493

Index 525

Editorial Reviews

"Asher is an insightful literary critic, a charming hagiographer, and, occasionally, a reluctant scold.… [Never a Lovely So Real] succeeds in filling the reader with the desire to read Algren’s books."

Bookforum - Christian Lorentzen

"Scrupulously researched.… One can only hope that efforts of remembrance like Never a Lovely So Real will help to return the author’s star to the literary firmament where it belongs."

Los Angeles Review of Books - Woody Haut

"A magnificently thorough and sensitive study of one of the great authors in twentieth century America. Nelson Algren, the instinctive rebel, troubled personality, object of liberal and conservative attacks in the Cold War era, rose above it all in his often brilliantly poetic prose. Colin Asher’s engrossing biography explores why Algren spoke for those who could not speak for themselves and demonstrates why we desperately need a voice like his today."

Paul Buhle

"Brings [Algren] to life with breathless intensity."

Deirdre Bair

"In the course of making the case for Algren’s neglected work, Asher does something else nearly as valuable, which is to reframe… the life: a life not just entertainingly full of incident but also inspiring and exemplary."

New Yorker - Jonathan Dee

"Asher’s book is devotional and beautifully written, seven years in the making, its sentences capturing the very same mix of lyricism and street, hard truths and sentimentality that made Algren himself so special.… It is in some important way the first biography of Algren to be written, because, although it’s technically the fourth or fifth, it’s the first really long one, and it’s the first to let you walk in Algren’s shoes."

Nation - Dan Simon

…absorbing…[Asher] scrupulously attempts to separate facts from myths (some created by Algren himself) as he explores how a writer who produced prose-poetry of such a high order could now be largely forgotten…The literary gossip in this biography, much of it drawn from letters, is intriguing, witty and sometimes acidic…We are currently experiencing a revival of interest in writers—white and black, male and female—shaped by the uncertainties of the 1930s in ways that resonate strongly today. This biography provides an invaluable introduction to one of the best of them.

The New York Times Book Review - Susan Jacoby

…a wonderfully readable, passionately partisan biography…In the course of making the case for Algren's neglected work, Asher does something else nearly as valuable, which is to reframe—and to free from myth and obfuscation, much of it Algren's own—the life: a life not just entertainingly full of incident but also inspiring and exemplary in a time when questions of art's role in resisting the enemies of democracy and economic justice are newly immediate…In Asher, [Algren] gets the biographer any writer dreams of: thorough, smart, literate, and unabashedly on his subject's side—a disciple, a role that puts him, as the book itself lays out, in excellent, even august company.

The New Yorker - Jonathan Dee

★ 01/21/2019

Aiming to place Nelson Algren in the literary canon, Asher, a literature instructor at CUNY, offers a thorough, admiring, and, most likely, definitive biography. Asher attributes this once-acclaimed author’s truncated career to a decades-long FBI investigation into his Communist Party ties and to changing literary fashions that overshadowed Algren’s achievements—foremost among them, alchemizing his observations of the mid-20th-century Chicago underclass into masterful novels such as the National Book Award–winning The Man with the Golden Arm. With vigorous, poetic detail, Asher reconstructs Algren’s formative experiences of poverty during the Depression and Army service during WWII, his burst of fame during the Cold War and subsequent struggles, and his twilight years as a mentor to writers such as Don DeLillo. Along with examining important relationships in Algren’s life, including his troubled marriages, friendship with Richard Wright, and long affair with Simone de Beauvoir, Asher reads Algren’s work carefully and well, from his early short stories to his last project, a biography of boxer Rubin Carter. Asher relies on the primary material assembled by previous biographers, filling in the blanks with a nearly unredacted version of Algren’s FBI file. The result is a generous, stylish portrait of an impulsive, directionless outsider who nonetheless established a place among the lions of mid-20th century American literature. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"As he presents Algren as a seminal American writer focused on injustice in this captivating, redefining, and sharply relevant biography, Asher also reveals how the insidious abuse of power by the federal government destroys lives."

Booklist (starred review) - Donna Seaman

"Easily the best biography of the great Nelson Algren, and an extraordinary book in its own right, Never a Lovely So Real reads like a novel about the strange and wayward life of a determined outsider. More than any first-rate American novelist of the postwar era, Algren has fallen through the cracks. Colin Asher is a wonderful storyteller, and I applaud his heroic project, in a callous phase of our national history, to restore the reputation of a writer who evoked the singular dignity of the lowliest human lives."

Blake Bailey

"Colin Asher has written a deeply researched, moving account of a great writer’s life. Nelson Algren was a titanic talent, a mid-twentieth-century comet of a novelist who lit up the literary landscape for two decades, then mysteriously darkened and all but disappeared. Asher’s biography goes a long ways towards explaining why."

Russell Banks

"Absorbing.…[Asher] scrupulously attempts to separate facts from myths…as he explores how a writer who produced prose-poetry of such a high order could now be largely forgotten."

Susan Jacoby

"[B]rilliant.…Not every biographer of a writer knows how to locate the source of his subject’s creative impulses, but Asher does.…[A] vivid, vastly insightful book."

New York Review of Books - Andrew O'Hagan

"[A] work of love and prodigious research and, as such, deserves to be honored."

The New Republic - Vivian Gornick

"“[L]evelheaded and illuminating. … Never a Lovely So Real has heft and heart, and it displays the sort of respect and loyalty to its subject that the novelist paid to the struggling, real-life people he put into his books."

Wall Street Journal - Thomas Mallon

2019-01-21

A champion of the downtrodden and marginalized was celebrated and reviled in his own time.

A fervent admirer of Nelson Algren (1909-1981), essayist Asher, a 2015/2016 fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, makes his book debut with a thoroughly researched, empathetic look at the life of the irascible, controversial writer. Drawing on sources from nearly 50 archives, including audio interviews and other material deposited by Algren's previous biographer; Algren's writings, letters, and interviews; and a "very lightly redacted" copy of Algren's 886-page FBI file, Asher aims to correct the "misunderstandings and inaccuracies" that have sullied Algren's reputation: notably, that he was an alcoholic, a "loner who burned every bridge he crossed," and a writer whose publishing problems were largely his own fault. Many of those inaccuracies derived from Conversations with Nelson Algren, published in 1964, in which Algren himself conveyed an image of "a shallower, tougher, more careless, more misogynistic, less emotional, less intellectual, and lonelier person than he had ever truly been." Although Asher tries mightily to counter that image, his findings often confirm them. Algren was certainly a hard drinker, thin-skinned, and sometimes paranoid. He "spent the first six decades of his life trying, and mostly failing, to balance a long list of competing and contradictory desires." He yearned for critical acclaim but also "the freedom to express controversial ideas." He wanted "devoted friends and the stability and comfort of a home, a wife, and children," but he could never settle down with a woman without feeling stifled, and he wanted to go out whenever and wherever he pleased. "Chasing those urges," Asher admits, "had left Nelson feeling lonely and regretful." Because of his communist sympathies, the FBI kept a file on Algren beginning in 1940, creating professional and personal obstacles. Without knowing the FBI's involvement in his career, Algren blamed his own shortcomings and became anxious and depressed. Asher chronicles Algren's marriages and affairs, especially with Simone de Beauvoir, who, much to Algren's dismay, publicized intimate details in her memoir, and he offers evenhanded readings of Algren's works.

A brisk, well-documented homage.

Kirkus Reviews