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The Texas Stories of Nelson Algren

Larry McMurty once wrote that Nelson Algren held the best literary claim to he Rio Grande Valley of Texas, though few people realise that the poet of the Chicago slums ever lived or wrote here. Yet it was in Depression-era Texas that Algren developed his instinctive need to speak for the powerless — a need that made him one of the foremost chroniclers of the American outcast. The Texas that Algren understood was a world where impoverished people lived among simmering yet casual violence, a world where the law — racist, abusive and corrupt — ruled with an utter ruthlessness and power.

The Texas Stories vividly re-creates this now-vanished world. The collection includes So Help Me, winner of a 1935 O. Henry Award; The Last Carousel, which won the 1972 Playboy Fiction Award; and the early Thundermug, a piece that was censored when it appeared in the radical Windsor Quarterly in 1935. Here too is Algren's unique retelling of the legend of Bonnie and Clyde. Including work from more than four decades, The Texas Stories provides a much-needed overview of Algren's artistic development. It will enthusiastically be welcomed by Algren fans, Texans, literary scholars, Western historians and many others.

Nelson Algren (1909-1981) was the author of eleven books, including Never Come Morning, The Neon Wilderness, A Walk on the Wild Side and The Man with the Golden Arm, which won the first National Book Award for Fiction in 1950.

Bettina Drew is the author of the critically acclaimed biography Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side.

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 159
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9780292704688
  • Settings
  • Texas
  • Genres
  • fiction
  • Release date
  • 1995