The Devil's Stocking - Softcover

Nelson Algren

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1583226990 ISBN 13: 9781583226995

Publisher: Seven Stories Press, 2006

Synopsis

Algren's last novel relates the story of Ruby Calhoun, a boxer accused of murder in a shadowy world of low-purse fighters, cops, con artists and bar girls. Algren chronicles a battle for truth and human dignity which gives way to a larger story of life and death deicisions. This is a man writing and you should not read it if you cannot take a punch. Mr. Algren, boy, you are good.' - Ernest Hemingway 'Algren is an artist whose sympathy is as large as Victor Hugo's, an artist who ranks among our best American authors.' - Chicago Sun Times'

About this title

About the Author

One of the most neglected of modern American authors and also one of the best loved, NELSON ALGREN (1909-1981) believed that "literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity." His own voluminous body of work stands up to that belief. Algren's powerful voice rose from the urban wilderness of postwar Chicago, and it is to that city of hustlers, addicts and scamps that he returned again and again, eventually raising Chicago's "lower depths" up onto a stage for the whole world to behold. Recipient of the first National Book Award for fiction and lauded by Hemingway as "one of the two best authors in America," Algren remains among our most defiant and enduring novelists. His work includes five major novels, two short fiction collections, a book-length poem and several collections of reportage. A source of inspiration to artists as diverse as Kurt Vonnegut and Donald Barthelme, Studs Terkel and Lou Reed, Algren died on May 9, 1981, within days of his appointment as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Edition details

• Publisher: Seven Stories Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1583226990
• ISBN 13: 9781583226995
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320