One of the most neglected of modern American authors and also one of the best loved, NELSON ALGREN (1909–1981) believed that “literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.” Recipient of the first National Book Award for Fiction and lauded by Hemingway as “one of the two best authors in America,” Algren remains among the most defiant and enduring novelists. His work includes five major novels, including Somebody in Boots (1935), Never Come Morning (1945), The Man with the Golden Arm (1949), two short fiction collections, The Neon Wilderness (1947) and The Last Carousel (1973), a book-length prose-poem, Chicago: City on the Make (1951), and several collections of reportage. Algren died on May 9, 1981, within days of his appointment as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

An Algren specialist as well as an established poet, BROOKE HORVATH is Emeritus Professor of English at Kent State University and an editor of volumes about Henry James and Thomas Pynchon. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including At Times, In a Neighborhood of Dying Light, Consolation at Ground Zero, and The Lecture on Dust, as well as a book of criticism, Understanding Nelson Algren. He lives with his wife Virginia and their daughters in Kent, Ohio.

DAN SIMON is founder and publisher of Seven Stories Press. His contributions to Algren scholarship include the essay “Algren’s Question” in the critical edition of The Man with the Golden Arm, which he coedited, and Nonconformity: Writing on Writing, a lost manuscript that Simon found in the Algren archives, coedited with C.S. O’brien, and to which he contributed the afterword.

COLIN ASHER is the author of Never a Lovely so Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren (W.W. Norton, 2019), a literary biography written as a work of creative nonfiction. His writing has appeared in The Believer, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, and many other publications.