Literary Influences: Nelson Algren

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Literary Influences: Nelson Algren

by Tom Milani

Tom Milani

I first read about Nelson Algren in an editorial in the old Washington Star shortly after his death on May 9, 1981. The editorial included a quote by Hemmingway on the power of Algren’s writing: “Mr. Algren can hit with both hands and move around, and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful.” [1] It ended by noting that Algren had died alone. I wanted to know more.

I was in college at the time, and one of my English professors picked up a used hardback copy of The Man with the Golden Arm for me at Second Story Books in Georgetown (I think it cost $3). Hemmingway’s endorsement suggested lean, muscular prose. But Algren had produced something entirely different.

Frankie Machine, the novel’s protagonist, a card dealer, sometime drummer, and morphine addict, is one of the underclass, barely getting by. Algren doesn’t portray Frankie and his friends as noble because they are poor, but he expounds at length on what their poverty means in a capitalistic society:

The great, secret and special American guilt of owning nothing, nothing at all, in the one land where ownership and virtue are one. Guilt that lay crouched behind every billboard which gave each man his commandments; for each man here had failed the billboards all down the line. No Ford in this one’s future nor ever any place all his own. … With his own eyes he had seen the truer Americans mount the broad stone stairways to success surely and swiftly and unaided by others; he was always the one left alone, it seemed at last… [2]

I read those lines over forty years ago and am still struck by how Algren dignified his subjects by writing about them lyrically. For him, the poor weren’t props, stand-ins for the evils of capitalism; instead, they were characters in their own right, for better or worse. And Algren didn’t shy away from the worse—he’d experienced his share of poverty and had been in jail for a petty crime—his descriptions not the product of a fervid imagination but rather lived experience.

The Man with the Golden Arm was Algren’s most famous work, winning him the first National Book Award, but Never Come Morning, published five years earlier, in 1942, put him on the literary map. The cover of my Avon paperback edition is pure pulp: Two sneering young men on a stairwell look down at a teenage girl sitting on a box spring; between them a muscular young man tries unsuccessfully to stare down the boys. The cover screams: TEEN-AGE TRAGEDY! The Great Novel of JUVENILE DELINQUENCY. The story is tragic, but that tragedy is the result of characters who can’t escape their circumstances: 

The world of Never Come Morning is a finely rendered, gray-hued, fatalistic place populated by angry, hungry young people whose lives are governed by rules that are clear, though impossible to abide by. Not one of them is innocent. They prey foremost upon each other, but also upon the wider world, and they acknowledge responsibility for their actions and pay for them. The reader might empathize with or fear them, but they are above pity, victimhood, or stereotype. [3]

Years later, H.E.F. Donohue asked Algren why he’d written the books he’d written. Algren answered that he’d “tried to catch the emotional ebb and flow and something of the fear and terror and the dangers and the kind of life that multitudes of people have been forced into with no recognition that such a world existed.” [4]

Algren wrote other books, both fiction and nonfiction, and for a while was famous. 

But The Devil’s Stocking, his novel about Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, was first published in Germany and not with an American publisher until after his death.

I’ve written at CrimeReads about how James M. Cain was my gateway drug into writing crime fiction, but I think Algren’s empathy for his characters and his ability to dignify them with lyrical prose were foundational in my development as a writer.

Who were your literary influences, and what did you take from them? Please let me know in the comments.

Notes:

[1] Bettina Drew, Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1989), p. 210.

[2] Nelson Algren, The Man With the Golden Arm (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1949), p. 17.

[3] Colin Asher, “But Never a Lovely So Real,” The Believer 95 (June 1, 2013), https://www.thebeliever.net/but-never-a-lovely-so-real/.

[4] H.E.F. Donohue, Conversations with Nelson Algren (New York: Berkley Publishing Corporation, 1964), p. 86.

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Tom Milani’s (www.tommilani.com) short fiction has appeared in several anthologies and online. His stories have been shortlisted twice for a Derringer, and “Barstow,” which originally appeared in Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir vol. 5, was an honorable mention for The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025. “Mill Mountain,” which originally appeared in Black Cat Weekly, was selected for The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2026. “A Sign of the Times,” which initially appeared in Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun, was selected for The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2026. Places That Are Gone, his debut novel, will be reissued by Open Road Media this fall.