Book Description
Ernest Hemingway once said of Nelson Algren's writing that "you should not read it if you cannot take a punch." The prose poem, Chicago: City on the Make, filled with language that swings and jabs and stuns, lives up to those words. This 50th anniversary edition is newly annotated with explanations for everything from slang to Chicagoans, famous and obscure, to what the Black Sox scandal was and why it mattered. More accessible than ever, this is, as Studs Terkel says, "the best book about Chicago."

"Algren's Chicago, a kind of American annex to Dante's inferno, is a nether world peopled by rat--faced hustlers and money--loving demons who crawl in the writer's brilliant, sordid, uncompromising and twisted imagination. . . . [This book] searches a city's heart and mind rather than its avenues and public buildings."--New York Times Book Review

"This short, crisp, fighting creed is both a social document and a love poem, a script in which a lover explains his city's recurring ruthlessness and latent power; in which an artist recognizes that these are portents not of death, but of life."--New York Herald Tribune

Nelson Algren (1909-1981) won the National Book Award in 1950 for The Man with the Golden Arm. His other works include Walk on the Wild Side, The Neon Wilderness, and Conversations with Nelson Algren, the last available from the University of Chicago Press. David Schmittgens teaches English at St. Ignatius College Prep in Chicago, Illinois. Bill Savage is a lecturer at Northwestern University and coeditor of the 50th Anniversary Critical Edition of The Man with the Golden Arm.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Chicago has produced and provoked some of America's most prominent writers. In this hardboiled prose poem by one of the best, the whole spectacular span and history of the great city unfolds, from the days of the Pottawottomies to the wide open first ward of Big Bill Thompson and the Black Sox scandal of the 1919 World Series. The cast of characters includes Al Capone as well as Jane Addams of Hull House and socialist Eugene Debs.

SYNOPSIS

Algren's classic, first published in 1951, captures the essence of Chicago's beauty, greed, and violence. This 50th anniversary edition includes an introduction by Studs Terkel (from the fourth edition, published in 1983), and new, detailed annotations by David Schmittgens (English, St. Ignatius College Prep) and Bill Savage (Northwestern University), explaining individuals, slang, and places of the period, such as Hinky Dink Kenna, Beer-on-Sunday parties, and Bronzeville.