About this item
Algren is the definitive biography of one of the best-known writers of mid-20th-century America. Chicago journalist Mary Wisniewski interviewed dozens of Algren's inner circle, including photographer Art Shay and the late Studs Terkel, and examined Algren's unpublished writing and correspondence, including hundreds of letters he received from lover Simone de Beauvoir, to craft an account as entertaining as it is meticulously researched. Algren reveals new details about the writer's life, work, personality, and habits, digging beneath the street-crawling man's man stereotype to show a funny, sensitive, and romantic but self-destructive artist. Wisniewski shows how, initially celebrated then savaged by literary critics for his continued preoccupation with prostitutes and drug addicts in his fiction, Algren was haunted by insecurity about his work and practically gave up writing fiction after 1956, and how he finally found a sense of community and acceptance in the artist colony of Sag Harbor before his death in 1981.
About the Author
Mary Wisniewski is a reporter and columnist at the Chicago Tribune. A former Reuters reporter covering Midwest crime and politics and a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, Wisniewski has won numerous awards for reporting, taught creative writing, and published literary reviews. Her new biography of Chicago writer Nelson Algren, "Algren: A Life," won praise from multiple publications, including the New York Times and Chicago Magazine, which called it "a captivating book that reads like a novel." She is an active participant in the Nelson Algren Committee, past president of the Chicago Headline Club, and appears frequently on local television and radio.
