Never a Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren
Description
For a time, Nelson Algren was America's most famous author, lauded by the likes of Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway. But at the height of his career, he abandoned fiction and fell into obscurity. Colin Asher's sublime biography of Algren unravels the enigma of his disappearance, explores the richness of his novels and nonfiction writing, and explains how a rash creative decision may have led his enemies to denounce him to the FBI during the Red Scare. Asher tells Algren's story in rich, novelistic detail, including his long-term affair with Simone de Beauvoir and the emotional breakdown that nearly cost him his life. Drawing from interviews, archival correspondence, and Algren's 886-page FBI file, Never a Lovely So Real portrays Algren as a dramatic iconoclast and reclaims him as a towering literary figure.
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Reviews
Brings [Algren] to life with breathless intensity.--Deirdre Bair, National Book Award-winning author of Samuel Beckett: A Biography
Absorbing.... [Asher] scrupulously attempts to separate facts from myths... as he explores how a writer who produced prose-poetry of such a high order could now be largely forgotten.--Susan Jacoby
A work of love and prodigious research and, as such, deserves to be honored.--Vivian Gornick
In the course of making the case for Algren's neglected work, Asher does something else nearly as valuable, which is to reframe... the life: a life not just entertainingly full of incident but also inspiring and exemplary.--Jonathan Dee
A magnificently thorough and sensitive study of one of the great authors in twentieth century America. Nelson Algren, the instinctive rebel, troubled personality, object of liberal and conservative attacks in the Cold War era, rose above it all in his often brilliantly poetic prose. Colin Asher's engrossing biography explores why Algren spoke for those who could not speak for themselves and demonstrates why we desperately need a voice like his today.--Paul Buhle, retired senior lecturer, Brown University; author of Marxism in the United States; and coeditor of Tender Comrades
Asher's book is devotional and beautifully written, seven years in the making, its sentences capturing the very same mix of lyricism and street, hard truths and sentimentality that made Algren himself so special.... It is in some important way the first biography of Algren to be written, because, although it's technically the fourth or fifth, it's the first really long one, and it's the first to let you walk in Algren's shoes.--Dan Simon
Never a Lovely So Real has heft and heart, and it displays the sort of respect and loyalty to its subject that the novelist paid to the struggling, real-life people he put into his books.--Thomas Mallon
Never a Lovely So Real has heft and heart, and it displays the sort of respect and loyalty to its subject that the novelist paid to the struggling, real-life people he put into his books.--Thomas Mallon
