Nelson Algren: The End is Nothing, The Road is All
The documentary film http://www.nelsonalgrentheroadisall.com
ONLY this documentary film has the OFFICIAL Endorsement of the Nelson Algren Committee.
This in-depth portrait of notorious American author Nelson Algren uses interviews, rare archival footage, and the gritty voice of Algren himself to capture the elusive and unique literary figure whose fame was cemented with the success of The Man with the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side.
Algren rose to prominence when he won the National Book Award in 1949 for The Man With The Golden Arm, which was later adapted into an Oscar-nominated film starring Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak. His book A Walk on The Wild Side inspired Lou Reed's hit. Despite his mainstream success and pop-culture bona fides, Algren's career was irreparably damaged by FBI and CIA surveillance during the Red Scare.
Kurt Vonnegut, Studs Terkel, Paul Buhle and others provide literary, social, and historic perspectives on a six-decade long career that produced five novels, two collections of short stories, countless articles and a public affair with Simone de Beauvoir. While his best work was produced over 50 years ago, Algren's prescient focus on disenchantment with consumer culture was prophetic, and remains relevant today.
"A sensitive portrayal of an important writer at mid-century in a uniquely American tale. The film is a musically, lyrically, and visually atmospheric journey through Algren's Chicago during the Depression, the Cold War, and the rise of corporate publishing. Serious and compelling."- Bettina Drew, Author of "Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side" / Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Missouri
ONLY this documentary film has the OFFICIAL Endorsement of the Nelson Algren Committee.
This in-depth portrait of notorious American author Nelson Algren uses interviews, rare archival footage, and the gritty voice of Algren himself to capture the elusive and unique literary figure whose fame was cemented with the success of The Man with the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side.
Algren rose to prominence when he won the National Book Award in 1949 for The Man With The Golden Arm, which was later adapted into an Oscar-nominated film starring Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak. His book A Walk on The Wild Side inspired Lou Reed's hit. Despite his mainstream success and pop-culture bona fides, Algren's career was irreparably damaged by FBI and CIA surveillance during the Red Scare.
Kurt Vonnegut, Studs Terkel, Paul Buhle and others provide literary, social, and historic perspectives on a six-decade long career that produced five novels, two collections of short stories, countless articles and a public affair with Simone de Beauvoir. While his best work was produced over 50 years ago, Algren's prescient focus on disenchantment with consumer culture was prophetic, and remains relevant today.
"A sensitive portrayal of an important writer at mid-century in a uniquely American tale. The film is a musically, lyrically, and visually atmospheric journey through Algren's Chicago during the Depression, the Cold War, and the rise of corporate publishing. Serious and compelling."- Bettina Drew, Author of "Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side" / Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Missouri
Algren’s Last Night a short video by Warren Leming
"Algren's Last Night" is the bittersweet tale of a Chicago writer bidding farewell to the city he had 'made his trade.' Based on a script written and narrated by Algren friend Warren Leming, Given the dark tone of Algren's work, Carmine Cervi creates his own film noir world in DV color. "Algren's Last Night" is: 'Video Noir'. Unique and evocative cityscapes reveal a dark, haunted Chicago rarely traveled or seen.
Director/Producer/Editor/Camera: Carmine Cervi
Actor/Writer/Producer: Warren Leming
https://youtu.be/N5E8MOkx554
Director/Producer/Editor/Camera: Carmine Cervi
Actor/Writer/Producer: Warren Leming
https://youtu.be/N5E8MOkx554
Algren: A Life by Mary Wisniewski
A tireless champion of the downtrodden, Nelson Algren, one of the most celebrated writers of the 20th century, lived an outsider's life himself. He spent a month in prison as a young man for the theft of a typewriter; his involvement in Marxist groups earned him a lengthy FBI dossier; and he spent much of his life palling around with the sorts of drug addicts, prostitutes, and poor laborers who inspired and populated his novels and short stories. Most today know Algren as the radical, womanizing writer of The Man with the Golden Arm, which won the first National Book Award, in 1950, but award-winning reporter Mary Wisniewski offers a deeper portrait. Starting with his childhood in the City of Big Shoulders, Algren sheds new light on the writer's most momentous periods, from his on-again-off-again work for the WPA to his stint as an uninspired soldier in World War II to his long-distance affair with his most famous lover, Simone de Beauvoir, to the sense of community and acceptance Algren found in the artist colony of Sag Harbor before his death in 1981. Wisniewski interviewed dozens of Algren's closest friends and inner circle, including photographer Art Shay and author and historian Studs Terkel, and tracked down much of his unpublished writing and correspondence. She unearths new details about the writer's life, work, personality, and habits and reveals a funny, sensitive, and romantic but sometimes exasperating, insecure, and self-destructive artist.
The first new biography of Algren in over 25 years, this fresh look at the man whose unique style and compassionate message enchanted readers and fellow writers and whose boyish charm seduced many women is indispensable to anyone interested in 20-century American literature and history.
http://www.chicagoreviewpress.com/algren-products-9781613735329.php
Chicago Tonight October 4, 2016, Algren: A Life with author Mary Wisniewski
Ernest Hemingway called him one of America's greatest novelists, second only to William Faulkner.
http://chicagotonight.wttw.com/2016/10/04/chicago-journalist-s-algren-life-reveals-new-details-about-writer
"Mary Wisniewski's Algren: A Life is an immensely readable portrait of the great but problematic Chicago writer. Exquisitely reported, sympathetic but clear-eyed, it's about the most complete account of his life and work I've seen. Wisniewski has a great sense of detail, and a wonderfully candid voice." —Achy Obejas, author of Days of Awe
"It's good to have the irascible, bohemian chronicler of the streets back via this top-notch biography." —Kirkus Reviews
"Nelson Algren was surely one of the most important post-World War II novelists in America, and his life and work are even more relevant today than they were in the 1940s and '50s, when he was at the peak of his popularity. . . . This new biography goes a long way toward redeeming both his life and his art. His novels and stories should be required reading in every American college syllabus. This excellent biography tells us why." —Russell Banks, author of Rule of the Bone and Cloudsplitter
The first new biography of Algren in over 25 years, this fresh look at the man whose unique style and compassionate message enchanted readers and fellow writers and whose boyish charm seduced many women is indispensable to anyone interested in 20-century American literature and history.
http://www.chicagoreviewpress.com/algren-products-9781613735329.php
Chicago Tonight October 4, 2016, Algren: A Life with author Mary Wisniewski
Ernest Hemingway called him one of America's greatest novelists, second only to William Faulkner.
http://chicagotonight.wttw.com/2016/10/04/chicago-journalist-s-algren-life-reveals-new-details-about-writer
"Mary Wisniewski's Algren: A Life is an immensely readable portrait of the great but problematic Chicago writer. Exquisitely reported, sympathetic but clear-eyed, it's about the most complete account of his life and work I've seen. Wisniewski has a great sense of detail, and a wonderfully candid voice." —Achy Obejas, author of Days of Awe
"It's good to have the irascible, bohemian chronicler of the streets back via this top-notch biography." —Kirkus Reviews
"Nelson Algren was surely one of the most important post-World War II novelists in America, and his life and work are even more relevant today than they were in the 1940s and '50s, when he was at the peak of his popularity. . . . This new biography goes a long way toward redeeming both his life and his art. His novels and stories should be required reading in every American college syllabus. This excellent biography tells us why." —Russell Banks, author of Rule of the Bone and Cloudsplitter
Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side by Bettina Drew
Bettina Drew is the author of the critically acclaimed "Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side," nominated for Book of the Year by the "Chicago Sun-Times," She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
Pre-War Tough Guy From Chicago : Clancy Sigal review 1989
NELSON ALGREN A Life on the Wild Side by Bettina Drew
What can you do about a major writer who--this fine biography tells us--liked the poor, did his fieldwork in low-rent bars and "walked and talked with a sort of pre-war style, tough but not mean, when by now it should have been the other way around"? Or who believed that "literature is made upon any occasion when a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity"?
http://articles.latimes.com/1989-12-17/books/bk-1394_1_nelson-algren
What can you do about a major writer who--this fine biography tells us--liked the poor, did his fieldwork in low-rent bars and "walked and talked with a sort of pre-war style, tough but not mean, when by now it should have been the other way around"? Or who believed that "literature is made upon any occasion when a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity"?
http://articles.latimes.com/1989-12-17/books/bk-1394_1_nelson-algren
A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren
by Simone de Beauvoir Clancy Sigal review 1998
Creatively, Simone and Nelson owed each other a tremendous, untraceable debt. He opened her up to an emotional freedom she had never before experienced. His thumbprints are all over de Beauvoir's now-classic "The Second Sex," a densely argued theoretical analysis of victimhood, "the female wound," which became an international best-seller. On Algren's work, de Beauvoir's impact is less evident--until we recall that the main female character in "The Man With the Golden Arm" (which won a Pulitzer), might easily have jumped off the pages of "The Second Sex."
http://articles.latimes.com/1998/oct/18/books/bk-33545
http://articles.latimes.com/1998/oct/18/books/bk-33545
Studs Terkel
Studs Terkel talks about Nelson Algren, a segment from the documentary The End is Nothing, The Road is All.
https://vimeo.com/88102277
https://vimeo.com/88102277