The writer Nelson Algren was an American original who, when he died in 1981, left behind a single work of literature that continues to haunt the American imagination. That work is the 1949 novel The Man With the Golden Arm, a book that has come as revelation to a good number of readers in every generation since it was first published. This in itself is a testament to the way a fully realized piece of writing can overcome the limitations of its own genre—in this case, the proletarian novel of the 1930s, which, by the late 1940s, was already in deep disfavor.



One of the novel’s current devotees is Colin Asher, who has written the newest Algren biography, Never a Lovely So Real. Many of Algren’s biographers were content to write of him as a working-class malcontent stuck in a decades-old style of literary realism. But Asher is a writer of his moment—that is, this moment—and he sees something timely in Algren’s tough-guy devotion to his underclass protagonists: a plea to acknowledge the ruthlessness we regularly deal out to social failure. He wants badly to understand the man for whom this devotion was a central metaphor.

Algren was born in Detroit in 1909 into a Jewish working-class family whose surname was Abraham. When he was three, the family moved to Chicago, where the father worked as a machinist, the mother ran a candy store, and life inside the Abraham household was hell—mainly because Mrs. Abraham was wildly dissatisfied with her life and cried out every day and all day that she hated “her house, her Irish neighbors, her children, and most especially her husband.... She called him a failure in front of their children, she called him stupid.” She yelled, “Get out of my sight!”

The tumult in the house made Nelson withdraw so far into himself that quite early he began to seem emotionally unavailable. In grade school, he’d leave the house in the morning and not return until the light had gone out of the sky. He roamed the streets of Chicago incessantly, which is how he came to love the city. In middle age, Algren wrote that once you’ve fallen in love with Chicago, “You’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”

NEVER A LOVELY SO REAL: THE LIFE AND WORK OF NELSON ALGREN by Colin Asher W.W. Norton & Company, 560 pp., $39.95

It was the 1920s, and Chicago was the crime capital of the world. Gangsters were everywhere, operating brothels and speakeasies and gambling clubs in every neighborhood in the city. One of these clubs was right next door to Mr. Abraham’s tire shop. There were cars parked outside the place at all hours of the day and night, with glamorous people coming and going, and dangerous-looking bouncers standing at the club’s entrance. Nelson was mesmerized.