Ernest Hemingway once said of Nelson Algren's writing that "you should not read it if you cannot take a punch." The prose poem, Chicago: City on the Make, filled with language that swings and jabs and stuns, lives up to those words. This 50th anniversary edition is newly annotated with explanations for everything from slang to Chicagoans, famous and obscure, to what the Black Sox scandal was and why it mattered. More accessible than ever, this is, as Studs Terkel says, "the best book about Chicago." "Algren's Chicago, a kind of American annex to Dante's inferno, is a nether world peopled by ratâ€”faced hustlers and moneyâ€”loving demons who crawl in the writer's brilliant, sordid, uncompromising and twisted imagination. . . . [This book] searches a city's heart and mind rather than its avenues and public buildings."â€”New York Times Book Review "This short, crisp, fighting creed is both a social document and a love poem, a script in which a lover explains his city's recurring ruthlessness and latent power; in which an artist recognizes that these are portents not of death, but of life."â€”New York Herald Tribune Nelson Algren (1909-1981) won the National Book Award in 1950 for The Man with the Golden Arm. His other works include Walk on the Wild Side, The Neon Wilderness, and Conversations with Nelson Algren, the last available from the University of Chicago Press. David Schmittgens teaches English at St. Ignatius College Prep in Chicago, Illinois. Bill Savage is a lecturer at Northwestern University and coeditor of the 50th Anniversary Critical Edition of The Man with the Golden Arm.

Chicago, City on the Make

History

Nelson Algren

Americas

McGraw=Hill

With its depictions of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, A Walk in the Wild Side has found a place in the imaginations of all generations since it first appeared. As Algren admitted, the book "wasn't written until long after it had been walked . . . I found my way to the streets on the other side of the Southern Pacific station, where the big jukes were singing something called 'Walking the Wild Side of Life.' I've stayed pretty much on that side of the curb ever since."
Perhaps the author's own words describe this classic work best: "The book asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives. Why men who have suffered at the hands of other men are the natural believers in humanity, while those whose part has been simply to acquire, to take all and give nothing, are the most contemptuous of mankind."

A Walk on the Wild Side: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

United States

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

The Man With the Golden Arm

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Rebel inc.

With its depictions of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, A Walk on the Wild Side found a place in the imaginations of all the generations that have followed. I found my way to the streets on the other side of the Southern Pacific station, where the big jukes were singing something called 'Walking the Wild Side of Life', wrote Algren. I've stayed pretty much on that side of the curb ever since."  Perhaps the author's own words describe this classic work best: "The book asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives. Why men who have suffered at the hands of other men are the natural believers in humanity, while those whose part has been simply to acquire, to take all and give nothing, are the most contemptuous of mankind."

A Walk on the Wild Side ( " Rebel Inc. " Classics)

Contemporary

Set in Chicago's Polish-American ghetto, a novel which depicts America's 'third person society', a state where the lower classes are exploited and dehumanized, a state where what is sordid is no longer shocking as its sufferers become accustomed to their inevitable victimization. From the author of WALK ON THE WILD SIDE.

Man With the Golden Arm

Four Walls, Eight Windows

Markus's vivid memories of raising his fists, mano a mano, led him into the working-class barrios of Havana, Mexico City, Brooklyn, and Dublin, where the odds against celebrity and high-stakes prize fighting belie the drive that motivates these young men. In a series of intimate portraits infused with purpose, determination, and the physical and emotional struggles of intense training, Markus gives a more human face to a sport that rewards only those from its highest ranks. Far from the bright lights and stereotyped fame, these young fighters possess unrivaled dignity and grace.

Boxers

Arts & Photography

Walter Kirn

Kurt Markus

Photography & Video

Twin Palms Pub

Nonconformity: Writing on Writing

Biographies & Memoirs

Blackstone Publishing

Hero Francis Majcinek, called Frankie Machine, returns to Chicago from World War II with a Purple Heart and an addiction to morphine, which he relies on to overcome the pain of a war injury and to numb the guilt he feels for a drunken spree that put his wife, Sophie, in a wheelchair. His wife spends her dreary days making him feel guilty. Frankie, a shrewd dealer in a seedy West Side poker parlor, is known as the Man with the Golden Arm, both because of his rapid reflexes and his morphine habit. Frankie finds love and solace in Molly Novotny, a young part-time prostitute, but he remains trapped in his marriage and drug habit until he gets involved in an accidental killing and a not-so-accidental robbery that bring him to the fateful moment when the police come knocking to arrest him for his part in the killing.

The Man With the Golden Arm (Library Edition)

Blackstone Audio,Inc.

The Man with the Golden Arm

Bruno Bicek, Lefty, is a prizefighter and small-time hood in Chicago. Boxing is his ticket to escape hard times and gang life, but when Bruno doesn't prevent the brutal gang rape of his girlfriend, Steffi, it tears them apart, their worlds changed forever. Bruno is sent to jail and Steffi to a brothel governed by the brutality of a local crime boss, The Barber. Sinister and dark, The Barber controls Steffi and has no intention of letting her go. Why should he, when he holds all the cards? Bruno and Steffi, who dream of breaking free, learn this in the end and find that for them there will be no bright morning.

Never Come Morning (Library Edition)

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Books by Nelson Algren