Never a Lovely So Real, Colin Asher
Never a Lovely So Real, Colin Asher
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Never a Lovely So Real
The Life and Work of Nelson Algren

Author: Colin Asher

Narrator: David Colacci

Unabridged: 18 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/02/2019


Synopsis

This definitive biography reclaims Nelson Algren as a towering literary figure and finally unravels the enigma of his disappearance from American letters.

For a time, Nelson Algren was America's most famous author, lauded by the likes of Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway. Millions bought his books. Algren's third novel, The Man with the Golden Arm, won the first National Book Award, and Frank Sinatra starred in the movie. But despite Algren's talent, he abandoned fiction and fell into obscurity. The cause of his decline was never clear. Some said he drank his talent away; others cited writer's block. The truth, hidden in the pages of his books, is far more complicated and tragic. Now, almost forty years after Algren's death, Colin Asher finally captures the full, novelistic story of his life in a magisterial biography set against mid-twentieth-century American politics and culture.

Never a Lovely So Real offers an exquisitely detailed, engrossing portrait of a master who, as esteemed literary critic Maxwell Geismar wrote, was capable of suggesting "the whole contour of a human life in a few terse pages."

About Colin Asher

Colin Asher is an award-winning writer whose work has been featured in the Believer, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle. An instructor at CUNY, he was a 2015/2016 Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Aaron on April 25, 2019

I don't say this lightly: This book is a masterpiece. It is crisply and addictively written, tenaciously researched, and both generous in spirit and critical in approach. You don't have to be interested in Algren or even know who he is, or be into literary biographies, to love this book. It is the s......more

Goodreads review by James on September 07, 2020

Nelson Algren was a good writer. He may have been the best writer some of us have never read. He's famous for a couple of novels, but I suspect that, like Jack Kerouac, his best writing is seldom read today. And also like Kerouac he preferred to write about the marginal regions of our cities and str......more

Goodreads review by Kevin on September 04, 2019

How could I, an alleged lover of books, have lived so long knowing so little about the life and work of Nelson Algren? Yes, he was out there on the frontiers of my awareness, with so many others. Then, on one of my regular visits to the "New Books" section at the main branch of the Boston Public Lib......more

Goodreads review by Michael on July 20, 2019

It's rare for me to read an author biography without having read much of anything by the author. In "Never a Lovely So Real," Colin Asher not only tells an epic life story, but he is re-introducing America to one of its great but forgotten authors. A man whose name should be next on the lips of anyo......more

Goodreads review by Mary on February 23, 2021

You will learn about a family and, in the process, an author. You’ll learn about the places the author lived in, the people he loved, revered, and of being very human. I think Nelson Algren lived an “all in” life: every step real and owned completely. I appreciated and loved learning about Algren as......more