Nelson Algren

Nelson Ahlgren Abraham was born in Detroit in 1909 and grew up in Chicago, where he would long live in the Polish neighbourhood. A journalism graduate of the University of Illinois at the beginning of the Depression, he sold coffee door to door in Louisiana, wandered through the Southwest and spent a few weeks in prison in Texas for stealing a typewriter. A military medical orderly in Europe during the war, he had an affair from 1947 to 1964 with Simone de Beauvoir, who drew a novel from it that he held against her. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters shortly before his death, he died on Long Island in 1981.

In the catalogue 1

• NovelThe Man with the Golden ArmNelson Algren · 1949Literature