BORN MARCH 28, 1909, DETROIT

died May 9, 1981, Sag Harbor, N.Y. original name Nelson Ahlgren Abraham writer whose novels of the poor are lifted from routine naturalism by his vision of their pride, humour, and unquenchable yearnings. He also catches with poetic skill the mood of the city's underside: its juke-box pounding, stench, and neon glare. The son of a machinist, he grew up in Chicago, where his parents moved when he was three. He worked his way through the University of Illinois, graduating in journalism in the depth of the Depression. He went on the road as a door-to-door salesman and migratory worker in the South and Southwest, then returned to Chicago, where he was employed briefly by a WPA (Works Progress Administration) writers' project and a venereal-disease control unit of the Board of Health. In this period, too, he edited with the proletarian novelist Jack Conroy the New Anvil, a magazine dedicated to the publication of experimental and leftist writing. Somebody in Boots (1935), his first novel, relates the driftings during the Depression of a young poor-white Texan who ends up among the down-and-outs of Chicago. Never Come Morning (1942) tells of a Polish petty criminal who dreams of escaping from his squalid Northwest Side Chicago environment by becoming a prizefighter. Before the appearance of Algren's next bookthe short-story collection The Neon Wilderness (1947), which contains some of his best writinghe served as a U.S. Army medical corpsman during World War II. Algren's first popular success was The Man with the Golden Arm (1949; filmed 1956), which won the National Book Award. Its hero is Frankie Machine, whose golden arm as a poker dealer is threatened by shakiness connected with his dope addiction. In A Walk on the Wild Side (1956; filmed 1962) Algren returned to the 1930s in a picaresque novel of New Orleans bohemian life. His nonfiction includes the prose poem Chicago, City on the Make (1951) and sketches collected as Who Lost an American? (1963) and Notes from a Sea Diary: Hemingway All the Way (1965).