Algren at Sea Notes from a Sea Diary & Who Lost an American?#Travel Writings

by Algren, Nelson

• ISBN13: 9781583228418
• ISBN10: 1583228411
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-01-06
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press

Summary

Nelson Algren's Two Books of Travel Writing Describe His journeys through the seamier side of the international social and political landscape of the mid-1960s. Algren at Sea brings both books together in one volume on the centenary of Algren's birth.

Author Biography

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.” His own voluminous body of work stands up to that belief. Algren’s powerful voice rose from the urban wilderness of postwar Chicago, and it is to that city of hustlers, addicts and scamps that he returned again and again, eventually raising Chicago’s “lower depths” up onto a stage for the whole world to behold. 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 our most defiant and enduring novelists. His work includes five major novels, two short fiction collections, a book-length poem and several collections of reportage. A source of inspiration to artists as diverse as Kurt Vonnegut and Donald Barthelme, Studs Terkel and Lou Reed, Algren died on May 9, 1981, within days of his appointment as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Table of Contents

Who Lost an American?
Acknowledgments	p. 10
New York: Rapietta Greensponge Girl Counselor, Comes to My Aid	p. 11
Down with All Hands: The Cruise of the SS Meyer Davis	p. 33
The Banjaxed Land: You Have Your People and I Have Mine	p. 45
The South of England: They Walked Like Cats that Circle and Come Back	p. 61
Paris: They're Hiding the Ham on the Pinball King or Some Came Stumbling	p. 77
Barcelona: The Bright Enormous Morning	p. 101
Almeria: Show Me a Gypsy and I'll Show You a Nut	p. 131
Seville: The Peseta with the Hole in the Middle	p. 137
Crete: There's Lots of Crazy Stuff in the Ocean	p. 153
Istanbul: When a Muslim Makes His Violin Cry, Head for the Door	p. 163
The Night-Colored Rider	p. 181
If You Got the Bread You Walk	p. 201
If I Can't Sell It I'll Keep Settin' On It; I Jest Won't Give it Away (Old Song)	p. 211
The Irishman in the Grotto, the Man in the Iron Suit, And the Girl in Gravity-Z: The Playboy Magazine Story or Mr. Peepers as Don Juan	p. 229
Epilogue: Tricks Out of Times Long Gone	p. 267
Notes From a Sea Diary: Hemingway All the Way
Acknowledgments	p. 271
Prefatory	p. 273
June 21, 1962: Two Hours Out of the Port of Seattle	p. 279
June 22nd	p. 281
June 27th: Lions, Lionesses, Deadbone Crunchers	p. 285
June 29th: East China Sea: We Didn't Come to Gamble	p. 295
July 1st: 472 Cho-Ryang-Dong: A Parlor Once Purple Now Faded to Rose	p. 299
July 4th: East China Sea	p. 309
July 6th: South China Sea, Two Days from the Port of Hongkong. Dingding, Hinkletinkle, the Finkified Lasagna and the Man Too Timid to Damn	p. 313
July 9th: Concannon Gets the Ship in Trouble or Assy-end Up on Ho-Phang Road	p. 319
July 13th: Indian Ocean: "I Can See You Have Been Wounded"	p. 333
July 14th: Rafts of a Summer Night	p. 341
July 15th: Arabian Sea	p. 349
Port of Bombay
Into the Gala Day	p. 355
July 15th: Port of Bombay II. Kamathipura	p. 369
July 17th: Port of Bombay III. Kalyani-of-the-Four-Hundred	p. 377
July 22nd: Arabian Sea	p. 385
Night in the Gardens of Horn & Hardart
Hemingway and Lardner	p. 393
Hemingway Himself	p. 397
The Real Thing in Kitsch	p. 401
July 25th: Bay of Bengal	p. 407
The Quais of Calcutta	p. 415
Kanani Mansions	p. 431
Epilogue: Quais of Calcutta	p. 461
About the Author	p. 463
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