Chicago's Nelson Algren

Photographs by Art Shay
Text by Art Shay
Foreword by David Mamet

Product Details
ISBN-10 1583227644
ISBN-13 978-1-58322-764-0
Publication Date Sep 2007
Nb of pages 168
Illustrations 120
Illustration type Photographs
Dimensions 8 x 8 in.

Description
They met in 1949 when Art was a reporter for Life. Shay followed Algren around with a camera, gathering pictures for a photo-essay piece he was pitching to the magazine. Life didn’t pick up the article, but Shay and Algren became fast friends. Algren gave Shay’s camera entrance into the back-alley world of Division Street, and Shay captured Algren’s poetry on film. They were masters chronicling the same patch of ground with different tools.

Chicago’s Nelson Algren is the compilation of hundreds of photos—many recently discovered and published here for the first time—of Nelson Algren over the course of a decade and a deeply moving homage to the writer and his city. Read Algren and you’ll see Shay’s pictures; look at Shay’s photos and you’ll hear Nelson’s words.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1583227644/?tag=imwan-20

Very interesting, Googa. Is there a link to more of this...other pics online that I can go to? I'm very impressed.

http://www.parisreview.com/viewintervie ... rmMID/4987

NELSON ALGREN The Art of Fiction No. 11

Interviewed by Alston Anderson & Terry Southern
Issue 11, Winter 1955



http://www.destinyland.org/algren.htm

My favorite Christmas story is about swindlers, who are ten years old, as recounted by one who grew up to be a famous novelist.

On December 4, 1949, the Chicago Sunday Tribune published Merry Christmas, Mr. Mark, a remembrance by Nelson Algren. A gambler and drinker, Algren had just written The Man With the Golden Arm, compassionately telling the story of a Chicago morphine addict. That year he'd won the National Book Award, continued his affair with Simone de Beauvoir, and even met Jean-Paul Sartre.

But as the year ended, the 40-year-old novelist set down his memories of being a young boy braving the December snow of 71st Street to sell the Saturday Evening Blade at the intersection by the cemetery.

"We'd worked up any number of swindles there..."


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"Sometimes, if the chump didn't have anything smaller than a two-bit piece, we'd duck into the saloon for change — and duck out the Ladies Entrance. Merry Christmas, Mr. Mark."
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And other swindles involved Chicago's famous wooden trolleys making their final stop by a nearby saloon.


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"There was almost always some fool on the rear platform waiting for the Blade to see who'd gotten killed today. We'd time it so as to hand him those blood-red headlines just as the trolley began its creaking jaunt west toward Halsted — the hustle then was to stumble alongside the car trying to reach the fool's change hand but never quite reaching it. That was no small stunt, the shape that trolley was in, even for a 10- year-old. Sometimes you'd have to have a coughing spell to slow you up.

Once one kid pulled that coughing routine and the mark got off the car and came back for his change, cough or no cough. He didn't care if the kid had TB. Some mark.

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But while shaking down customers, the news boys discovered they could incorporate the end-of-the-year holiday.



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Around Christmastime the paper guys had cards printed and sold them to us little paper guys for a nickel apiece. They read something like this:

Christmas comes but once a year
When it comes it brings good cheer
So open your heart without a tear
And remember the newsie standing here.

That got them, every time. Especially if there was a light fall of snow. And the swindle in the card routine was this: After he'd paid for the verse and would be thinking he owned it, you'd have to tell him no, it was your only card, you just wanted him to see the sentiment on it, it had cost you a nickel, so please mister could you have it back?

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When he was 24, sixteen years before writing the essay, Algren served five months in jail for stealing a typewriter. Some think the incident began his lifelong identification with con men, outsiders, and America's unacknowledged underclass. But his muckraking prose wasn't always welcomed, and his career declined over the years to come. Algren was isolated and self-isolating, according to publisher Daniel Simon, who wrote that over the decades the writer lost his familiar ebullience.

When he died they named a street in Chicago after him — and then after complaints from the neighborhood, changed it back. Within five years, every word he'd written fell out of print.

But eight years earlier, at the age of 64 — Nelson assembled a final collection of his life's works called The Last Carousel. It had been 24 years since he'd written "Merry Christmas, Mr. Mark," but he made sure it was included.

Search Google for its title today, and you'll find just three matches (though Google's Book Search includes the story in its entirety). In its final paragraphs, the hard-boiled novelist acknowledged the possibility that somewhere out there, some genuine compassion might just be waiting.
That was thirty Chicago Christmases and Lord-Knows-How-Many Swindles ago. That saloon is long gone, whole populations have been buried in that cemetery, and the Toonerville Trolley is now a street-car bus. But that big mark of a Santa still keeps coming around, year after year.

It begins to look to me like he must be in on some fast hustle himself. Maybe it's a kickback on those toys he pushes. Maybe he got something on somebody.

Maybe he knows something we don't know.

Nelson Algren at the Division Street Y, 1951

from http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/shay_art.php

Art Shay
(American, b. 1922)

One of Chicago’s most prolific photographers, Art Shay has published more than 30,000 photographs during his career, which has spanned more than half a century and covered such subjects as John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign, the fights of Muhammad Ali, Hugh Hefner’s infamous bedroom office, the last man alive to have seen Abraham Lincoln’s corpse, Chicago police clubbing demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, and a swan snubbing a pig as they swim.

Some of his favorite photographs, however, are those of Chicago writer Nelson Algren, author of The Man with the Golden Arm and winner of the first National Book Award. Shay and Algren met in 1949 when Shay pitched a story on “the prose poet of the Chicago slums” to his editors at Life magazine. The two men became close friends and spent time roaming near the West Side, encountering addicts, hookers, alcoholics, bums, cops, and hustlers, among many other street characters. The gritty photo essay was never published, but photographs from the series are currently held in many private and public collections. Both passionate about and critical of Chicago, Shay wrote a novel, Never Come Morning, depicting the seedy underbelly of crime and poverty in the city, which was banned by the Chicago Public Library System. After Algren’s death in 1981, Shay published Nelson Algren’s Chicago, a collection of his photographs from the men’s years together as well as accompanying texts. As of 2004, Shay is currently writing Waiting for Nelson, a play depicting the real-life love triangle between Algren, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Art Shay worked first as a reporter and then as a photographer for numerous publications including Life, Fortune, The New York Times, and Sports Illustrated. His photograph of Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev on an Iowa farm won Life magazine’s “Picture of the Year” in 1959. Shay has also published several books on photography and sports, including Nelson Algren’s Chicago (1988), Album for an Age (2000), and Animals (2002). His play, Where Have You Gone, Jimmy Stewart was produced by Chicago’s American Theater Company (ATC) in 2002.



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Shay, Arthur. Album for an Age: Unconventional Words and Pictures from the Twentieth Century. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000.

Shay, Arthur. Couples. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003.

I own the original 1955 Japanese movie poster of Otto Preminger's "The Man With the Golden Arm". It's the oldest poster in my collection and most prized, designed by the great Saul Bass.

Thanks, Googa. This is all very interesting stuff. I appreciate your sharing it with everywan.

US poster:

Thanks, Francíne, and thank you for your interest and support for Nelson Algren.

Sure, no problem. I find him really interesting. Btw, I really like the poster. Was the movie a hit?

Was the movie a hit? With an Elmer Bernstein score, a Saul Bass credits and poster design, Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak in leading roles, Otto Preminger directing, it's a great, great movie from the greatest decade in cinema, the 1950's!