 First edition | |
| Author | Nelson Algren |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Short stories: tragi-comedy, satire |
| Publisher | Doubleday & Co. |
Publication date | 1947 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 286 (1st ed.) |
| OCLC | 1117160 |
| 813.52 | |
The Neon Wilderness (1947) is the first short-story collection by American writer Nelson Algren. Two of its stories [1] had received an O. Henry Award. Algren received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters [2] the same year.
The book collects 24 stories: 8 previously published (from 1933 to 1947) [3] [4] and 16 new. Most of them are set in then-contemporary Chicago (1930s and 1940s), in the so-called "Polish-American ghetto". They revolve around the lower classes: workers and unemployed, drunkards and gamblers, prostitutes and hustlers, small-businessmen and policemen. Unlike Dickens or Zola, their general tone is tragi-comedy or sympathetic satire.
Two stories had received an O. Henry Award (and been reprinted in the related annual volume): Algren's second-published story "The Brothers' House" [1] (1935 award) and "A Bottle of Milk for Mother (Biceps)" [1] (1941 award). Two had been selected for The Best American Short Stories : "A Bottle of Milk for Mother" [4] (as "Biceps", [5] 1942 volume) and "How the Devil Came Down Division Street" [4] (1945 volume). The year the collection was released, Algren received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a grant from Chicago's Newberry Library. [2]
The collection contains the following 24 stories (with first appearance for the 8 previously published).
Nelson Algren was an American writer. His 1949 novel The Man with the Golden Arm won the National Book Award and was adapted as the 1955 film of the same name.
Biceps is a muscle located on the inside of the upper arm.
Edgar Lee Masters was an American attorney, poet, biographer, and dramatist. He is the author of Spoon River Anthology, The New Star Chamber and Other Essays, Songs and Satires, The Great Valley, The Serpent in the Wilderness, An Obscure Tale, The Spleen, Mark Twain: A Portrait, Lincoln: The Man, and Illinois Poems. In all, Masters published twelve plays, twenty-one books of poetry, six novels and six biographies, including those of Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Vachel Lindsay, and Walt Whitman.
Neon lighting consists of brightly glowing, electrified glass tubes or bulbs that contain rarefied neon or other gases. Neon lights are a type of cold cathode gas-discharge light. A neon tube is a sealed glass tube with a metal electrode at each end, filled with one of a number of gases at low pressure. A high potential of several thousand volts applied to the electrodes ionizes the gas in the tube, causing it to emit colored light. The color of the light depends on the gas in the tube. Neon lights were named for neon, a noble gas which gives off a popular orange light, but other gases and chemicals are used to produce other colors, such as hydrogen (red), helium (yellow), carbon dioxide (white), and mercury (blue). Neon tubes can be fabricated in curving artistic shapes, to form letters or pictures. They are mainly used to make dramatic, multicolored glowing signage for advertising, called neon signs, which were popular from the 1920s to 1960s and again in the 1980s.
A Walk on the Wild Side is a 1956 novel by Nelson Algren, also adapted into the 1962 film of the same name. Set in Depression era, it is "the tragi-comedy of Dove Linkhorn", a naive Texan drifting from his hometown to New Orleans.
James Thomas Farrell was an American novelist, short-story writer and poet.
Meridel Le Sueur was an American writer associated with the proletarian literature movement of the 1930s and 1940s. Born as Meridel Wharton, she assumed the name of her mother's second husband, Arthur Le Sueur, the former Socialist mayor of Minot, North Dakota.
Kevin John Brockmeier is an American writer of fantasy and literary fiction.
The Man with the Golden Arm is a novel by Nelson Algren, published by Doubleday in November 1949. One of the seminal novels of post-World War II American letters, The Man with the Golden Arm is widely considered Algren's greatest and most enduring work. It won the National Book Award in 1950.
The Face on the Barroom Floor may refer to:
Melissa Susan Bank was an American author. She published two books—The Wonder Spot, a volume of short stories, and The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing—and won the 1993 Nelson Algren Award for short fiction. She taught at Stony Brook University.
Art Shay was an American photographer and writer.
Story is a literary magazine published out of Columbus, Ohio. It has been published on and off since 1931. Story is a member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and receives support from the Greater Columbus Arts Council and the Ohio Arts Council.
The Night Side is an anthology of fantasy and horror stories edited by American writer August Derleth and illustrated by Lee Brown Coye. It was first published by Rinehart & Company in 1947. The stories had originally appeared in the magazines Amazing Stories, Collier's Weekly, Weird Tales, Saturday Review, The London Mercury, Unknown, Astounding Stories, Esquire, The Briarcliff Quarterly, Cosmopolitan, Blue Book, Top-Notch and Fantastic Adventures or in the collections The Clock Strikes Twelve, The Children of the Pool, Fearful Pleasures, Nights of the Round Table and My Grimmest Nightmare.
The Sleeping and the Dead is an anthology of fantasy and horror stories edited by American writer August Derleth. It was first published by Pellegrini & Cudahy in 1947. Many of the stories had originally appeared in the magazines The London Mercury, Weird Tales, Scribner's, Dublin University Magazine, Unknown, Esquire, The Bellman, Vanity Fair and Black Mask. An abridged edition was published by Four Square Books in 1963 under the same title.
John Wesley Conroy was a leftist American writer, also known as a Worker-Writer, best known for his contributions to “proletarian literature,” fiction and nonfiction about the life of American workers during the early decades of the 20th century.
The Heroes may refer to:
Somebody in Boots is writer Nelson Algren's first novel, based on his personal experiences of living in Texas during the Great Depression. The novel was published by Vanguard Press in 1935. The title refers to someone with material well-being and authority, as poor folk and the powerless wore shoes or went barefoot. The bosses and police feared by the poor and downtrodden wear boots, which not only symbolize their power and relative affluence, but can be used as weapons against them.
A list of the published work of Nelson Algren, American writer.
Helen Balfour Morrison was an American photographer best known for her collaborations with dancer Sybil Shearer. Her work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the Chicago Film Archives, the Smithsonian Archives of American Art as well as many other institutions.