Happy Birthday, Nelson

Algren was the author of more than a dozen books. I'm betting that his two most famous novels -- The Man With the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side, one a tragedy and the other a comedy -- will last longer than any of the novels by Mailer, Vidal, Updike, Cheever, Kerouac, Vonnegut, Pynchon, de Lillo, Roth, Bellow, or Bukowski.

Algren would have been 101 today. He was born March 28, 1909, in Detroit. In 1975, when this video was made, he left Chicago for Paterson, N.J., moved on to Hackensack and finally to Sag Harbor, N.Y., where he died May 9, 1981, and where he is buried.

March 28, 2010 2:19 PM | | Comments (1)

1 Comments

By Michael Caplan on March 29, 2010 1:49 PM

Hi Jan--I just showed a clip of the work in progress ["Algren" documentary] on Saturday night at the Algren Birthday celebration, put on by the inimitable Algren Committee. Art Shay was there, music, fun, cupcakes. Lots of fun. Best regards.

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'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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