The Man with the Golden Arm (50th Anniversary Edition) 50th Anniversary Critical Edition

by Algren, Nelson; Savage, William J.; Simon, Daniel; Vonnegut, Kurt; Terkel, Studs

• ISBN13: 9781583220085
• ISBN10: 1583220089
• Edition: 50th
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-11-09
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press

Summary

The Man with the Golden Arm, the classic American novel of the postwar period, is Nelson Algren's most powerful and enduring work. To celebrate this book's fiftieth anniversary, Seven Stories has released the first critical edition of an Algren work. With contributions by Algren biographer Bettina Drew, Algren scholar James R. Giles, Carlo Rotella, Lee Stringer, Studs Terkel, and Kurt Vonnegut, among others.

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

Editors' Preface	vii
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM	1	(450)
REMEMBRANCES
Letter to Joe Haas	345	(4)
Nelson Algren
Arm: A Memoir	349	(14)
John Clellon Holmes
Algren's Golden Pen	363	(4)
Mike Royko
Algren as I Knew Him	367	(4)
Kurt Vonnegut
Glasses	371	(6)
Studs Terkel
Nelson Algren's Politics	377	(4)
Stuart McCarrell
Photographing Nelson Algren	381	(6)
Layle Silbert
EARLY RECEPTION
Nelson Algren: The Iron Sanctuary	387	(6)
Maxwell David Geismar
Nelson Algren	393	(6)
George Bluestone
A Voyeur's View of the Wild Side: Nelson Algren and His Reviewers	399	(12)
Lawrence Lipton
NEW VIEWS
Algren's Question	411	(6)
Daniel Simon
The Quality of Laughter: Algren's Challenge to the Reader	417	(6)
William J. Savage Jr.
The Story of Decline and the October City	423	(10)
Carlo Rotella
The Heart of the Matter	433	(4)
Bettina Drew
The Value of Dissent	437	(2)
James R. Giles
Golden Arm's Song of Sweet Surrender	439	(6)
Lee Stringer
An Algren Photo Essay	445	(6)
Art Shay
Contributor Biographies	451	(2)
Acknowledgments and Credits	453	(2)
About the Author	455