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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.