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‘He really lived this life that he wrote about’: remembering Nelson Algren
The award-winning writer helped to define the grit of postwar urban fiction but fell from fame in the years after. A new documentary aims to tell his story
“Thinking of Melville, thinking of Poe, thinking of Mark Twain and Vachel Lindsay, thinking of Jack London and Tom Wolfe, one begins to feel there is almost no way of becoming a creative writer in America without being a loser.” So declared the great Nelson Algren, gutter bard and patron saint of Chicago letters, a man who recognized the quiet dignity of loserdom and accepted more than a little of it for himself. He rose to the top of the literary demimonde during the 40s and 50s on his writing about societal cast-offs, rough-edged characters based on the people he met in dank bars, back rooms and street corners. In training his focus on those most preferred not to think about, Algren found a bruised nobility in the down-but-not-out subjects who considered him one of their own and became a national name for it. As his celebrity declined and his output waned, however, his legacy has somewhat diminished in comparison with that of peers like mutual admirer and friend Ernest Hemingway.
That’s where Michael Caplan, director of the new documentary Algren, hopes to come in. After more than a decade spent on a production interrupted by disappearing and reappearing funds, the professor/film-maker has completed his tribute to the enduring brilliance of a larger-than-life literary luminary. Caplan had a fortuitous encounter with cult-legend photographer Art Shay in 2008, who suggested that he take up Algren for a future project and offered a massive cache of up-close-and-personal photos as its basis. A completed cut screened for hometown audiences at the Chicago international film festival in 2014, only to gather dust on Caplan’s shelf for the rest of the decade, until the immobility of the pandemic lockdown compelled him to take action. He sculpted a fresh edit and with this week’s long-awaited digital release, he’ll make his bid to restore Algren’s name to the top of the writerly firmament.
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