Book Review: Algren: A Life, like its subject, gets the job done. This is a solid biography, fair and balanced (a sometimes forgotten necessity), hitting all the major details and giving the reader all the required basics. Mary Wisniewski gives (too) long summaries of Algren's novels, but her analysis is to the point. The reader comes away knowing enough, without any big gaps or questions.
A friend to Richard Wright, lover of Simone de Beauvoir (author of The Second Sex), admired by (the often jealous) Hemingway, known for writing sexy potboilers. Algren felt he had to live where he was writing about, and cared about the people he was writing about. People liked him. How can you not admire an author who spent time in jail for stealing a typewriter? Because that fact is emblematic of Algren, who wrote not of the working class, but the class beneath that, those living in the shadows, the world of petty criminals, prostitutes, poverty, pimps, pushers, and addicts. Mentally damaged veterans. The wretched and confused. Those not employable in the traditional sense. But unlike most chroniclers of the underclass, his work was more literary than simply sensationalist, he had concern and compassion for those he wrote about. Algren may not have been a feminist, but his influence on The Second Sex, his recognition of the hypocrisy of those patronize hookers only to blame the women, and his take on the Playboy empire are all spot on. He also recognized the hypocrisy and corruption of "politicians who believe the poor can take care of themselves while the rich need government help."
Reading Algren: A Life I had no major complaints, but a number of smaller ones, though none that detracted from the essential value of the book. Wisniewski refers to Algren almost uniformly as "Nelson" throughout the book, sounding like an elderly aunt talking about her nephew. But this habit is not unique to Wisniewski, about half the biographies on my shelf do so; it just seems somehow unprofessional to me. More unprofessional is that the sentences sometimes sink to the elementary school level: "Nelson got so mad he threatened to tell the postal authorities on Wallie." "Got so mad," "tell on"? Editing or proofing could have helped: characters change names for no apparent reason and some sentences resist repeated reading. The Polish in Chicago get a fair amount of screen time, and the author very nicely quotes her dad. I've not read the 1989 biography, Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side by Bettina Drew (35 ratings, 3.9 on Goodreads), so I can't compare them. But Algren: A Life was a quick, informative, and valuable read if you're interested in this little known and largely forgotten American author. [4★]
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