Comments on: Nelson Algren Goes to Hollywood http://eppsnet.com/2006/09/nelson-algren-goes-to-hollywood Online journal based in Orange County, CA. Hilarious anecdotes tempered by the icy chill of certain death. Sat, 22 Nov 2008 13:54:27 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.2 By: Grant Faulkner http://eppsnet.com/2006/09/nelson-algren-goes-to-hollywood#comment-534 Grant Faulkner Sat, 07 Oct 2006 05:59:40 +0000 http://eppsnet.com/2006/09/nelson-algren-goes-to-hollywood#comment-534 I've read nearly everything Algren has written, and one of the things that makes him so compelling as an author is that he was a man on the make <i>and</i> a man with incredible integrity--which sheds light on his Hollywood flirtations. It's hard to be both. Maybe you have to be from Chicago. One of his biographers posited that if it hadn't been for the McCarthy hearings, Algren's brand of fiction would have been received with much more fanfare, and perhaps we'd have a different trajectory of literary fiction as a result (e.g., much more gritty, realist, socialist, etc.). The reaction to studying Algren that I received from one of my professors certainly seems to <a href="http://litmatters.blogspot.com/2006/09/nelson-algren.html" rel="nofollow">back that up</a>. Anyway, here's to not sleeping with anyone whose troubles are worse than your own, unless she's Simone de Beauvoir (who Algren aided in her first orgasm, according to her letters). I’ve read nearly everything Algren has written, and one of the things that makes him so compelling as an author is that he was a man on the make and a man with incredible integrity–which sheds light on his Hollywood flirtations. It’s hard to be both. Maybe you have to be from Chicago.

One of his biographers posited that if it hadn’t been for the McCarthy hearings, Algren’s brand of fiction would have been received with much more fanfare, and perhaps we’d have a different trajectory of literary fiction as a result (e.g., much more gritty, realist, socialist, etc.). The reaction to studying Algren that I received from one of my professors certainly seems to back that up.

Anyway, here’s to not sleeping with anyone whose troubles are worse than your own, unless she’s Simone de Beauvoir (who Algren aided in her first orgasm, according to her letters).

]]>