- Hardcover: 96 pages
- Publisher: Four Walls Eight Windows (October 1995)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1888363231
- ISBN-13: 978-1888363234
- Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
In works like The Man with the Golden Arm, Algren (1909-1981) looked at the rough-and-tumble lives of petty criminals and drug addicts, writing with a tough compassion without romanticizing his subject matter. These same characteristics inform this odd and passionate manifesto, which he wrote in the early 1950s but which is seeing publication for the first time now, edited by Simon, the publisher of Seven Stories. While in part a look at the writing life and American literature, the book's central obsession is with the political pressures put on artists during the '50s and the larger pressures toward conformity Algren saw in American life. While at times rambling and at other times dated, the depth of feeling running beneath Algren's words is palpable, and his demand that American artists fully engage with their culture remains relevant. Anyone seeking to understand how the McCarthy era affected the inner lives of artists will find much material here. FBI informants who denounced Algren to his then-publisher Doubleday helped prevent this book from being published at the time it was written. Readers will find much that bears thought in this wise, courageous and humane book.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
From Kirkus Reviews
A previously unpublished work from the author of The Man With the Golden Arm and other masterful portraits of the seamy underside of urban America. This volume, essentially a lengthy essay in book form, was written by Algren in the early 1950s, at the peak of his fame and the height of the McCarthy era. At the time, his lengthy affair with Simone de Beauvoir was coming to an unhappy end and he was throwing himself into the public arena in reaction to that private pain. Nonconformity shows its origins in those multiple traumas. Opening with a brief and mournful recollection of F. Scott Fitzgerald's ``crack-up,'' Algren jumps into a passionate defense of the writer as someone who must live out the emotions of his characters, no easy thing in an era in which all the forces of the state and the market seem to be calculated to produce conformist writing that commits nothing, dares nothing, and achieves nothing. It is a time, he writes repeatedly, in which Americans are caught ``between the H bomb and the A,'' with the threat of internal destruction greater than any threat from the so-called Red Menace. At such a time, Algren says defiantly, a writer's attitude to his readers should be ``this ain't what you rung for, Jack--but it's what you're damned well getting.'' That's certainly the mind-set that dominated Algren's best writing. The afterword and notes by Simon are useful, placing the essay in a larger biographical and historical context. However, the editor's claim that this is ``Algren's only book-length work of non-fiction'' is dubious; Algren also turned out two substantial travel books and an essay of similar length on his native Chicago, each of them filled with the same corrosive writing on the American scene. That said, this is a typically refreshing breath of cigarette-smoke-filled air from one of our most underrated writers, angry and funny as Algren usually is. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an alternate
Hardcover
edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Timeless Algren Still Loud and Clear,
By DryHeatReader (Gilbert, Arizona) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Nonconformity (Paperback)
Written with furious urgency, sharp economy, and timeless resonance, Nelson Algren's Nonconformity: Writing on Writing is an often bleak, yet always sentient book-length essay on the role of artists, particularly writers, who work from, about, and for an American culture that doesn't value the significance of artistic contribution, and that actually rejects and fears artistic expression when it moves against the forces of pious consumerism, blind nationalism, and disconnected apathy. Back in Algren's day, those forces were personified by names like McCarthy and McCarran, Sheen and Oursler; today they're Rumsfeld and Ashcroft, Limbaugh and Savage. And the Red Scare of Algren's world had turned into today's "Arabic threat" that fosters needless suspicion and faith in puppet leaders who call for roundups of the innocent. Algren Bolsters his insights with a barrage of memorable quotes from the Masters: Dostoevsky, Twain, and most importantly, Fitzgerald--none of whom, it seems, ever worked in the comfort of societal/institutional trust and acceptance, no matter how well known they were. Will there ever be comfort for the writer? "A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is for armed robbery," Algren explains. There are many, many more forces working against the writer today, especially against the young and unknown: fewer venues to reach the respect of an audience, and a culture that would much rather spend its time in front of the television, at the movies, or on the internet--but rarely on moving works of complex, serious literature. No writers have ever had it easy, and if you're in for the long haul of lonely obscurity, this book is good company to keep. Algren is empowering. His thesis is louder, clearer, and more important than ever.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Only pretentious dweebs title their online reviews,
By Eric Piotrowski (Gainesville, Florida) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Nonconformity (Paperback)
I've been writing for ten years and this book has become a bible for me. I planned on reading one chapter one night before going to bed, and instead stayed up until dawn reading it and thinking about what the author's compelling essays. It's the best book I've ever read about the art of writing and the responsibility of writers.It used to be much easier to submit reviews. These days every company pretends like its website is the only one people will ever visit on the web. Gack.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliance Cooked To Critical Mass,
By Caverly E. Stringer (Mamaroneck, NY (You asked!)) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Nonconformity (Hardcover)
This book stalks sure footed through the dense thicket of modern American literature, with The Novel and Nelson Algren firmly at its center. It is at once entirely personal and, sonehow, universal at the same time. What it has to say about about writing evokes the kindred spirit shared by all great writiers, vastlty differing though thier style and temperments might be. Each exquisitely realized chapter is peppered with excerpts of their prose in such a way that it fairly leaps off the page, providing a critical mass of context and vibrancy to the very difficult subject of what it is that writers do and do best. Get it. Read it. Love it. I certainly did.
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