Hard-boiled Chicago writer Nelson Algren (1909-1981) made his name with the novels The Man with the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side, both of which would become major motion pictures (and inspire Lou Reed to write one of his greatest songs). In their 2015 documentary, Ilko Davidov, Mark Blottner, and Denis Mueller look at the life of the award-winning novelist and poet from his humble beginnings to the height of literary fame, accompanied by readings from his works by Algren himself, in addition to Warren Leming, co-founder of Chicago's Nelson Algren Committee.
Algren, who grew up on Chicago's South Side, graduated with a degree in journalism from the University of Illinois, left with high hopes, and landed smack against the Great Depression. Out of desperation, he took whatever jobs he could find throughout the South. While there, he worked on his first novel, but then he got caught with a stolen typewriter. Fortunately, the judge took mercy on him, and he found his way back to Chicago.
He soon fell in with Richard Wright and Studs Terkel who were involved with the WPA's Federal Writers' Project (Algren provided Wright with the title of his 1940 novel Native Son). Trouble would continue to find him as his novel Never Come Morning was banned due to complaints from the Polish community since his low-life protagonists were of Polish descent (he was living in Wicker Park, the Polish quarter). It wouldn't stop him from writing about pimps, prostitutes, and drug addicts. In the documentary, Terkel argues that he gave these characters humanity.
Algren's personal life was as messy as that of the characters he wrote about, and speakers mention his marriages (he married and divorced Amanda Kontowicz twice), his chronic infidelity, and his relationship with Simone de Beauvoir, French author of The Second Sex. He was also a gambling addict who once lost an entire month's salary on a losing hand—he lost his wife's, too. As Kurt Vonnegut, who taught alongside him at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, puts it, "This was pathological."
During the last three decades of Algren's life, his disillusionment with his declining career prospects increased to the point that he sold his typewriter, along with most of the rest of his belongings, and traded Chicago for Paterson, New Jersey, and then later Sag Harbor, New York. He would write again, but his greatest successes were behind him.
For all the praise he receives in this film from biographers (Bettina Drew, James R. Giles, and Bruce Horvath), booksellers (Stuart Brent), and others, Vonnegut says, "He was the loneliest man I ever knew." The documentary doesn't completely crack the code as to why that came to be, but Davidov, Blottner, and Mueller (solo director of Howard Zinn: You Can't be Neutral on a Moving Train) offer an enlightening portrait of an author who wrote about people on the margins with a distinctly poetic, unsentimental form of sympathy. As Studs Terkel states, Algren was "the bard of the losers."
Where does this title belong on library shelves?
Nelson Algren: The End Is Nothing, The Road Is All belongs on documentary shelves in academic and public libraries with other author biographies, like Michael Caplan's 2014 Algren, which takes a different approach to the writer's life.
What kind of film series could use this title?
If you are programming a film series on Chicago culture, you would find a vital example in Nelson Algren: The End Is Nothing, The Road Is All.
What type of instructors will use this title?
American literature and history instructors will find a solid introduction to the life and career of Nelson Algren in The End Is Nothing, The Road Is All. They might also find it instructive to compare Algren's novels with the two best known big-screen adaptations, Otto Preminger's The Man With the Golden Arm and Edward Dmytryk's A Walk on the Wild Side.