Here is the biography of Nelson Algren:
Nelson Algren was born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham on March 28, 1909, in Detroit, Michigan, to a Jewish family. His paternal grandfather, who was of Scandinavian extraction, had converted to Judaism on his own volition and married a Jewish woman. Algren had an older sister, Bernice.
The family's roots were in Chicago, where his grandparents owned a trading post, and in 1913, his parents moved back to Chicago, settling into an Irish neighborhood on the South Side. Algren attended the neighborhood public schools and Chicago would become his muse and the real subject of his major works.
Algren's family subsequently relocated to the Chicago's Northwest Side, where his father went into business with a tire and battery shop. Algren attended Hibbard High School and roamed his neighborhood, playing pool and beginning his obsession with gambling that would continue throughout his life.
After graduating from high school in 1927, Algren attended the University of Illinois, majoring in sociology. He often spent time in the Polish neighborhoods east and south of his own neighborhood. After graduation from college in 1931, he hitchhiked through the Midwest in order to find a job as a journalist.
Algren worked briefly at a Y.M.C.A. in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, before returning to Chicago, but he hit the road again that autumn. Traveling south with only the Mississippi River as his pilot, Algren wound up in New Orleans, where he was struck by the great amount of poverty in the Crescent City.
Algren remained in New Orleans, working as a door-to-door salesman for a coffee company and a pharmacy, before using his savings to hit the road again in 1932. He earned his living as a fruit picker in South Texas and tried to renovate a gas station, but the venture was both boring and unprofitable, so he began to wander again.
At the end of 1932, Algren moved back to Chicago, where he joined the left-wing John Reed Club, named after the American Communist buried in the Kremlin who wrote the book about the 1917 Russian Revolution "Ten Days That Shook the World". His active membership in the group allowed him to befriend Richard Wright, who would later borrow the original title of Algren's first novel "Somebody in Boots" for his own classic "Native Son".
Algren hit the road again in 1933, traveling to Texas, where he drifted through San Antonio, El Paso, and El Paso's border-town of Juarez, Mexico, before settling in Alpine, Texas. Upon leaving Alpine, Nelson attempted to steal one of the typewriters from the local business college and was arrested.
In a surprisingly long trial, Algren's lawyer defended on the common law principle that he, as a writer, is allowed the tools of his trade. Found guilty, he was sentenced to two years of punishment with the proviso he could serve the sentence wherever he wanted to. It was clearly time to leave Texas, though he would write of Texas in his first novel, "Somebody in Boots", and in his fourth, "A Walk on the Wild Side" (1956) and in multiple short stories.
Back in Chicago by June 1934, Algren established himself as a member of a literary circle that met on Rush Street in the North Side. It was during this period that he wrote his first published novel, "Somebody in Boots", which received poor reviews when it was published in March 1935. The bad reviews and a poor relationship with his girlfriend led to a suicide attempt, and he received mental health care at the University of Chicago Psychiatric Center.
After recovering his mental equilibrium, he and his girlfriend Amanda moved to a small apartment on the South Side of Chicago. Algren was taken on by the Federal Writers' Project, part of the Works Progress Administration that sought to put people back to work in their areas of expertise. During frequent visits to East St. Louis, Illinois, he befriended prostitutes and junkies, the kinds of people who would become the characters in his novels and short-stories.
In a fateful decision, Algren and Amanda moved in May 1940 to the neighborhood at Milwaukee and Division Street, Chicago's so-called Polish Triangle. As the clouds of war moved closer to the United States, Algren's father and sister Bernice died, and their passing and the Polish-Americans of his new neighborhood inspired his second novel, "Never Come Morning".
