The Nelson Wilderness: A Review of Never a Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren, by Colin Asher
To his credit, Colin Asher, the Brooklyn-based author of “Never a Lovely So Real” (a line taken from Algren’s exquisite and ambivalent prose poem “Chicago: City on the Make”) takes on many of the clichés that have accreted around Algren’s work. Asher never forgets how rooted Algren was in the proletarian novel school of the 1930s, and how nourished he was, along with his friend and comrade Richard Wright, by the John Reed Club and other manifestations of the Depression-era Communist Party.
