Nelson Algren

Nelson Algren, the author of two of the seminal works of post-World War II American letters ("The Man With the Golden Arm" and "A Walk on the Wild Side") was born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham on March 28, 1909 in Detroit, Michigan, into a Jewish family. His paternal grandfather, who was on Scandinavian extraction, had converted to Judaism on his own volition, and then married a Jewish woman, as had his half-Jewish father. Nelson had an older sister, Bernice. His family's roots were in Chicago, Carl Sandburg's "City of Broad Shoulders", and in Black Oak, Indiana, where his grandparents owned a trading post, and in 1913, his parents moved back to Chicago, settling into what was then an Irish neighborhood on the South Side. The future writer attended the neighborhood public schools. Chicago would become his muse and be the real subject of his all his major works,a major character in his oeuvre just as it was for the writer James T. Farrell in his Studs Lonigan trilogy. The family subsequently