As rock and roll novelist Tom Carson writes in his introduction, "The
Neon Wilderness is the pivotal book of Nelson Algren's career--the one
which bid a subdued but determined farewell to everything that had
earlier made him no more than just another good writer, and inaugurated
the idiosyncratic, bedevilled, cantankerously poetic sensibility that
would see him ranked among the few literary originals of his times."
Algren's classic 1947 short story collection is the pure vein Algren
would mine for all his subsequent novels and stories. The stories in
this collection are literary triumphs that "don't fade away."
Among the stories included here are "A Bottle of Milk for Mother," about
a Chicago youth being cornered for a murder, and "The Face on the
Barrome Floor," in which a legless man pummels another man nearly to
death--the seeds that would grow into the novel Never Come Morning.
Algren's World War II stories whose final expression would be in the
novel The Man with the Golden Arm are also part of this collection. "So
Help Me," Algren's first published work, is here. Other stories include,
"The Captain Has Bad Dreams," in which Algren first introduced the
character of the blameless captain who feels such a heavy burden of
guilt and wonders why the criminal offenders he sees seem to feel no
guilt at all. And then there is "Design for Departure," in which a young
woman drifting into hooking and addiction sees her own dreaminess
outlasting her hopes.
