The Neon Wilderness

by Algren, Nelson; Terkel, Studs

• ISBN13: 9781583225509
• ISBN10: 1583225501
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-01-08
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press

Summary

The stories in The Neon Wilderness established Algren in the pantheon of American writers and formed the vein that he mined for all his subsequent novels and stories. Included are A Bottle of Milk for Mother, about a youth being cornered for a murder, The Face on the Barroom Floor, in which a legless man nearly pummels someone to death, and So Help Me, Algrens first published story. Algrens short stories are now generally acknowledged to be literary triumphs. The New York Times

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

introduction	7	(10)
the captain has bad dreams	17	(18)
how the devil came down division street	35	(7)
is your name joe?	42	(5)
depend on aunt elly	47	(18)
stickman's laughter	65	(8)
a bottle of milk for mother	73	(18)
he couldn't boogie-woogie worth a damn	91	(13)
a lot you got to holler	104	(15)
poor man's pennies	119	(8)
the face on the barroom floor	127	(15)
the brothers' house	142	(5)
please don't talk about me when i'm gone	147	(10)
he swung and he missed	157	(8)
el presidente de mejico	165	(14)
kingdom city to cairo	179	(9)
that's the way it's always been	188	(12)
the children	200	(6)
million-dollar brainstorm	206	(11)
pero venceremos	217	(5)
no man's laughter	222	(8)
katz	230	(6)
design for departure	236	(27)
the heroes	263	(9)
so help me	272	(15)
afterword	287	(7)
an interview with nelson algren	294