Here is one more note on the Algren Live event at the Steppenwolf Theater, from David L. Ulin, the book editor of the Los Angeles Times. Click to read his essay, Nelson Algren's legacy ebbs. Here is an excerpt about the event and about Art Shay's photos:
Arranged in a line across the stage are nine chairs, in which sits an
unlikely array of people, beginning with Simon and "Wild at Heart"
author Barry Gifford, and featuring novelists Russell Banks and Don
DeLillo and actor Willem Dafoe. Together, they're rehearsing a bit of
reader's theater called "Nelson Algren Live," which will be performed
this night before a packed house, including Harold Augenbraum,
executive director of the National Book Foundation, and former Life
magazine photographer Art Shay, who took the most iconic shots of the
author, black-and-whites of him playing poker or peering through
barroom windows, pictures so gritty you can almost feel the dirt rise
off the frame.
These photos, as much as anything, are responsible for Algren's image as "the poet of the Chicago slums," yet they also cast him in amber: a midcentury figure, smoking a cigar, eyebrows raised behind round glasses, turning over another card. Sixty years after winning the first National Book Award, for his 1949 novel of addiction, "The Man With the Golden Arm," Algren has become vestigial enough that discussions of a national celebration were scaled back after, as Augenbraum notes in an e-mail, "we concluded that though his writing continued to resonate, the number of his readers and his currency among the general reading public had diminished."
So what, exactly, is Algren's legacy? That's the question the Steppenwolf event means to raise.
These photos, as much as anything, are responsible for Algren's image as "the poet of the Chicago slums," yet they also cast him in amber: a midcentury figure, smoking a cigar, eyebrows raised behind round glasses, turning over another card. Sixty years after winning the first National Book Award, for his 1949 novel of addiction, "The Man With the Golden Arm," Algren has become vestigial enough that discussions of a national celebration were scaled back after, as Augenbraum notes in an e-mail, "we concluded that though his writing continued to resonate, the number of his readers and his currency among the general reading public had diminished."
So what, exactly, is Algren's legacy? That's the question the Steppenwolf event means to raise.
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