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Why is Nelson Algren not better known?

Algren defined postwar American urban fiction, with his use of social realism, leftist politics and noir.

As a novelist, Nelson Algren had one of the most incredible runs in American literature, beginning in 1942 with Never Come Morning, the story of a Polish criminal and boxer in Chicago, and ending in 1956 with A Walk on the Wild Side, which was set among the pimps and whores of New Orleans and made a mockery of the American Dream. No doubt, with these books, Algren defined American urban fiction in the postwar years, combining as they do threads of leftist politics, social realism, and noir.

His novels are character driven and remain focused on the challenges of the daily lives of people trying to survive in an indifferent universe. Always his stories are written in the language of his characters, as if by giving voice to the voiceless, Algren has established the true purpose of literature. For example, in his novel The Man with the Golden Arm, he describes his characters postmortem:

The luckless living soon to become the luckless dead. The ones who were fished out of river or lake, found crumpled under crumpled papers in the parks, picked up in the horse-and-wagon alleys or slugged, for half a bottle of homemade wine, in the rutted tunnels that run between the advertising agencies and the banks.

In 1955 Algren was interviewed by The Paris Review and was flying high atop the literary world. Buy why hasn’t Algren lingered in our consciousness? Russell Banks believes that it has to do with a fundamental split at the heart of his writing. “The people he wrote about,” Banks says, “were different than those who read his books, which is a divide that’s impossible to get around.”

Sadly, Algren’s star flamed out, consumed by bitterness and alcohol. The last 25 years of his life he failed to write anything worth reading. Nonetheless, he stood up for what was important in life and literature and should be better remembered.

Clang, clang, clang went the trolley

I was in the Claremont Village today and used my Flip Video Camcorder to capture the trolley. It’s fun to ride the Claremont trolley, but at a cost of over $300,000 a year the city has decided that’s money better spent somewhere else. What they should have done is devised a better route than the limited Village-only one. Oh well, by June 30 the trolley will be history.

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Shakespeare: Thinking of Death

Shakespeare lost his ring at the 1616 wedding of his daughter Judith; it was found near Stratford Church in 1810.

Shakespeare died on this day in 1616, also his birthday. He’d drawn up his will earlier the new year although he wasn’t that old at fifty-one, but in those days people drew up their wills when they felt death approaching. That’s what Tudor people did, and there was an abundance of self-help books on the subject, one of which Shakespeare no doubt used for Claudio’s famous speech (”Ay, but to die, and go we know not where”) in Measure for Measure. The idea that you played your part on the stage and then promptly left was a commonplace.

What brought on his sense of impending death we may never know, although his younger brothers were already dead, and by most accounts his health was fading. There’s the supposition that he suffered from syphilis, which would not have been impossible since he had lived as a single man in London for several decades, and there is the reference to venereal disease at the end of the sonnets — the “strange maladies” contracted in the late 1590s during his “hell of time.” His signature certainly gives evidence of shakiness and perhaps illness. But the story I like most surrounding his death is the one of a fever brought on after a night of drinking with Warwickshire poet Michel Drayton and the Bard’s old friend Ben Jonson.

The illness that took Shakespeare’s life is unknown and is likely to remain so. We do know that he was tended by his son-in-law Dr. John Hall — only thirteen years Shakespeare’s junior. It is known that Dr. Hall kept a careful record of his patients’ illnesses, but sadly, of the two casebooks he left behind, the surviving one begins the year after Shakespeare’s death. About the man we know next to nothing before his marriage to Susanna Shakespeare in 1607. About all we know is that his medical practice was extensive, and he must have remained on friendly terms with his father-in-law because he and Susanna were executors of Shakespeare’s will. Dr. Hall proved the will in June, 1616, in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Registry in London.

MLA Handbook Seventh Edition

The newest MLA Handbook

A lot has changed since I used the 1977 edition of the MLA Handbook to write my first undergraduate theses. (Keats was its subject, but what little could I have known about this marvelous of poets back then?) Funny, how I have vivid memories of the handbook’s now-archaic instructions for preparing the paper: use of a “fresh black ribbon and clean type are essential” and using “thin paper except for a carbon copy” was highly recommended. As a teacher, I can attest that today’s students have never fumbled with a black ribbon and have little understanding of how carbon copies work. In the thirty years since my undergraduate days in Flordia, there has been a seismic shift in the way students conduct research, find primary and secondary sources, gather and store information, and prepare a finished paper. I’m certainly grateful I had the MLA Handbook back then, and I cannot imagine completing a research project in today’s computerized world without the careful, concise Seventh Edition, which I purchased yesterday and have been poring over ever since. (Yes, we English teachers have a strange idea of what makes interesting reading.) As my students know, I’m finishing up a guide to MLA documentation which I hope to publish by early summer. It should prove helpful to my future students — after my current students battle-test my rough draft in the coming weeks.