Kurt Vonnegut Remembers Nelson Algren

I just wrote and then lost a fairly lenghty post about this poignant essay, excerpted from the latest edition of The Man With the Golden Arm, in which Kurt Vonnegut remembers his friend Nelson Algren. I've got to get back to work, so, rather than rewrite it, I'll simply provide a sample quote that gives a sense of what Vonnegut finds notable about Algren's writing:

While he was only 13 years my senior, so close to my own age that we were enlisted men in Europe in the same world war, he was a pioneering ancestor of mine in the compressed history of American literature. He broke new ground by depicting persons said to be dehumanised by poverty and ignorance and injustice as being genuinely dehumanised, and dehumanised quite permanently. Contrast, if you will, the poor people in The Man with the Golden Arm with those in the works of social reformers like Charles Dickens and George Bernard Shaw, and particularly with those in Shaw's Pygmalion, with their very promising wit and resourcefulness and courage.

I was struck by the cruel irony surrounding Algren's death. He died on May 9, 1981, the day he was to host a cocktail party in honor of finally being admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a group that had hitherto either snubbed or overlooked him, despite having awarded Algren its Medel for Literature. Vonnegut was invited to the gathering and planned to take a young writer who admired Algren and told Vonnegut that Algren had written the most intelligent review of his new novel. The young novelist was Salman Rushdie, and the novel was Midnight's Children. When Vonnegut phoned Algren's number to inform him of his plans to bring a guest, the police answered and Vonnegut learned his friend was dead.