The Man With The Golden Arm

“The finest American novel published since the war.” –Washington Post Book World

“A true novelist’s triumph.” –Time

“Algren is an artist whose sympathy is as large as Victor Hugo’s, an artist who ranks, with this novel, among our best American authors.” –Chicago Sun-Times

“Powerful, grisly, antic, horrifying, poetic, compassionate … [there is] virtually nothing more that one could ask.” –New York Times Book Review

Nelson Algren was born on March 28, 1909, in Detroit, and lived most of his life in Chicago. A writer known for his powerful and often bleak portrayals of the American underbelly, Algren believed that “literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.”

His first short fiction appeared in Story magazine in 1933, followed by his debut novel, Somebody in Boots, in 1935. In 1942, Algren enlisted in the Army. His second novel, Never Come Morning, published in 1945, achieved widespread acclaim and sold over a million copies, with Jean-Paul Sartre translating its French edition.

Algren’s 1947 short story collection, The Neon Wilderness, solidified his reputation. His most significant novel, The Man with the Golden Arm, was published in 1949 and won the inaugural National Book Award for Fiction in 1950. Subsequent works include the prose poem Chicago: City on the Make (1951) and the novel A Walk on the Wild Side (1956), a reimagining of Somebody in Boots. He also authored two travel books, Who Lost an American? and Notes from a Sea Voyage, and a collection of fiction and nonfiction, The Last Carousel (1973).

Algren died on May 9, 1981, shortly after being appointed a fellow of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Posthumous publications include his final novel, The Devil’s Stocking (1983), based on the life of Hurricane Carter, and the essay collection Nonconformity: Writing on Writing (1996). In 2009, Entrapment and Other Writings brought to light a significant collection of previously unpublished works, including early masterpieces and an unfinished novel fragment.

Colin Asher, author of Never a Lovely So Real (2019), the definitive biography of Nelson Algren, is an instructor at CUNY and a former Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography.

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