Nelson Algren’s Personalism: The Influence of the Federal Writers’ Project

I. Naturalism on Its Head

Writing about Nelson Algren in 1953, the critic Maxwell Geismar noted a dramatic difference between Algren’s first novel, Somebody in Boots (1935), and his second novel, Never Come Morning (1942). The former, he claims, is “in the straight documentary style of the 1930s: a thesis novel of social protest,” with a tone that is both “sentimental and melodramatic” (122). The latter is “an entirely different story” wherein “this literary orbit of bitter, hungry lusts, of stunted emotions and stuffed lives, the realism is cold and brutal” (123). But Geismar does not ponder any conceivable source of this stylistic shift, instead remarking, “What happened to Nelson Algren himself during these seven years I have been unable to find out” (122).

From a vantage point of some sixty years later, we can discern that “what happened to Nelson Algren” in that timeframe was the Federal Writers’ Project (fwp), a massive New Deal relief program for which he worked from 1936 to 1941. Established by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1935, the fwp put thousands of unemployed professionals to work documenting American life during the Depression. Federal writers—many of whom would become famous, including Algren, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, and Dorothy West, to name a few—collected reams of oral histories and folklore from ordinary Americans and produced hundreds of guides to cities and states across the country.¹ In addition to providing much-needed paychecks, the program offered aspiring writers an inventory of raw material as well as training in a documentary form that fused urban realism with the language of subjective experience. I argue here that Algren’s early evolution as writer was borne out of his engagement with the fwp.

Another case in point: in 2009, a selection of Algren’s previously uncollected and unpublished stories, essays, and sketches was published as Entrapment and Other Writings. Organized chronologically and grouped into prewar and postwar categories, the collection provides a bird’s eye view of the contrast between his writing prior to joining the Writers’ Project and the work he produced shortly after he left the program.

Take, for example, three short vignettes that date from 1935: “Lumpen,” “Within the City” and “American Obituary,” published respectively in The New Masses, The Anvil, and Partisan Review. All adhere roughly to the rough naturalism of the proletarian form in which working people are portrayed as victimized by the ideology and inequalities of American capitalism. “Lumpen” follows a conversion narrative where the drifting narrator, appalled by witnessing blacks and whites marching together in solidarity, winds up taking a job selling Huey Long’s leftwing newspaper The American Progress. In the end, we know his enlightenment is imminent (33–36). “Within the City” is a journalistic account of a soft-spoken “mulatto girl” who dances in the dime burlesques and stoically endures the degradation of Chicago’s mean streets. Algren closes the piece pondering revolution: “And when I left her it seemed to me that this city will one day flame into revolt from the quiet ways of such beings as this mulatto girl: that all the daughters of the poor will rise, their voices no longer docile, and that day is not far” (38). Finally, “American Obituary” sketches one Frank Mears, “unemployed by civilization,” who wanders drunk waving a dollar bill “like a flag,” for which he is mugged and murdered on a Chicago street. In elegy, the narrator tells the young dead man: “you still wouldn’t have gotten drunk one day if you’d had a day’s work to do” (40).

Each story displays Algren’s ability to incisively render the landscape and language of the underclasses. These are the people that would become Algren’s lifelong muse: the lost souls of urban blight and the Great Depression. Yet all three stories suffer the stiffness of politically motivated writing, in which the vividness of the characters and prose is undermined by their service to the larger message. To be fair, these stories represent early documentary sketches aimed at left-wing journals...