One of the most neglected of modern American authors and also one of the best loved, NELSON ALGREN (1909–1981) believed that “literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.” Recipient of the first National Book Award for Fiction and lauded by Hemingway as “one of the two best authors in America,” Algren remains among the most defiant and enduring novelists. His work includes five major novels, including Somebody in Boots (1935), Never Come Morning (1945), The Man with the Golden Arm (1949), two short fiction collections, The Neon Wilderness (1947) and The Last Carousel (1973), a book-length prose-poem, Chicago: City on the Make (1951), and several collections of reportage. Algren died on May 9, 1981, within days of his appointment as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. SUSAN JACOBY is an independent scholar and the author of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004), which was listed as a notable book by The New York Times and The Washington Post, and New York Times bestseller The Age of American Unreason (2008). Her reviews, articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of national publications, including The New York Times, The American Prospect, Dissent, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and The Washington Post Book Review, among others. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
