When I moved to Chicago, reading Nelson Algren was like getting a Marshall Field's credit card. It signified that you were clued in to the local culture--or in the case of Algren's characters, a noir subculture. Algren's addicts, hoods and hookers were locked into grim fates that could made reading a slog. Like Algren, though, Mary Wisniewski brings compassion and humor to her subject. She sees him clearly as a self-destructive dreamer like one of his antiheroes, with flashes of nobility and brilliance.

Wisniewski pulls together Algren's walks on the wild side--freighthopping through the South, befriending Chicago barflies, playing house with feminist Simone de Beauvoir--with the kind of through line that Algren sometimes struggled to find in his picaresque novels. She frames the de Beauvoir romance from the start as ill-fated: "He spent part of his last day on Earth yelling about her, and she went to her grave with his ring on her finger." Algren's dark vision has faded even in his old neighborhood, but Wisniewski deals us back in with the dexterity of backroom card dealer Frankie Machine.

An outstanding biography of the most underrated American novelist of all time.

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