With its depictions of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, A Walk on the Wild Side found a place in the imaginations of all the generations that have followed. “I found my way to the streets on the other side of the Southern Pacific station, where the big jukes were singing something called ‘Walking the Wild Side of Life,’” wrote Algren. “I’ve stayed pretty much on that side of the curb ever since.”

Perhaps the author’s own words describe this classic work best: “The book asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives. Why men who have suffered at the hands of other men are the natural believers in humanity, while those whose part has been simply to acquire, to take all and give nothing, are the most contemptuous of mankind.”

Nelson Algren’s two travel writing books describe his journeys through the seamier sides of great American cities and the international social and political landscapes of the mid-1960s. Algren at Sea brings them together in one volume.

Notes from a Sea Diary offers one of the most remarkable appraisals of Ernest Hemingway ever written. Aboard the freighter Malaysia Mail, Algren ponders his personal encounter with Hemingway in Cuba and the values inherent in Hemingway’s stories as he visits the ports of Pusan, Kowloon, Bombay, and Calcutta.

Who Lost an American? is a whirlwind spin through Paris and Playboy clubs, New York publishing and Dublin pubs, Crete and Chicago, as Algren adventures with Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Brendan Behan, and Juliette Greco.

Nelson Algren sought humanity in the urban wilderness of postwar America, where his powerful voice rose from behind the billboards and down tin-can alleys, from among the marginalized and ignored, the outcasts and scapegoats, the punks and junkies, the whores and down-on-their luck gamblers, the punch-drunk boxers and skid-row drunkies and kids who knew they’d never reach the age of twenty-one: all of them admirable in Algren’s eyes for their vitality and no-bullshit forthrightness, their insistence on living and their ability to find a laugh and a dream in the unlikeliest places.

In Entrapment and Other Writings–containing his unfinished novel and previously unpublished or uncollected stories, poems, and essays–Algren speaks to our time as few of his fellow great American writers of the 1940s and ’50s do, in part because he hasn’t yet been accepted and assimilated into the American literary canon, despite that he is held up as a talismanic figure. “You should not read [Algren] if you can’t take a punch,” Ernest Hemingway declared. “Mr. Algren can hit with both hands and move around and he will kill you if you are not awfully careful.”

These four recordings of twentieth-century American authors interpreting their own works were highly praised when first released in the 1960s. Today the cultural and historical value of these recordings makes them an essential part of our literary heritage.

Nelson Algren reads from his most famous novel, The Man with the Golden Arm, about the decline and fall of a drug dealer and card sharp. Bernard Malamud’s devastating selection from The Magic Barrel portrays poor, embittered old Jews who achieve a moment of grace after fierce antagonism. In John Updike’s story from Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories, a seminary student working as a lifeguard draws a witty and lyrical contrast between saving souls and bodies. And James Jones’ account of a World War II battle in Japan in The Thin Red Line shows young soldiers at their most heroic and perilous moments.

Author Nelson Algren reads from his award-winning novel, The Man with the Golden Arm. The passage tells of Frankie Machine’s wife, Sophie, who confined to a wheelchair since a drunk-driving accident caused by Frankie. The narration implies that Sophie’s paralysis is psychological in origin, and is unconsciously used to keep Frankie with her. Frankie is in hiding, being sought by the police for murder. Sophie waits anxiously for his return, recalling their early love, and drifting in and out of fantasies that foreshadow the breakdown and mental institution that await her.

Algren planned the reading meticulously, arranging various sections from the novel to form a coherent whole.

Bruno Bicek, “Lefty,” is a prizefighter and small-time hood in Chicago. Boxing is his ticket to escape hard times and gang life, but when Bruno doesn’t prevent the brutal gang rape of his girlfriend, Steffi, it tears them apart, their worlds changed forever. Bruno is sent to jail and Steffi to a brothel governed by the brutality of a local crime boss, the Barber. Sinister and dark, the Barber controls Steffi and has no intention of letting her go. Why should he, when he holds all the cards? Bruno and Steffi, who dream of breaking free, learn this in the end and find that for them there will be no bright morning.

The struggle to write with deep emotion is the subject of this extraordinary book, the previously unpublished credo of one of America’s greatest twentieth-century writers.

“You don’t write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich,” writes Nelson Algren in his only longer work of nonfiction, adding: “A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.”

Nonconformity is about twentieth-century America: “Never on the earth of man has he lived so tidily as here amidst such psychological disorder.” And it is about the trouble writers ask for when they try to describe America: “Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards … [where there] are still … defeats in which everything is lost [and] victories that fall close enough to the heart to afford living hope.”

In Nonconformity, Algren identifies the essential nature of the writer’s relation to society, drawing examples from Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Twain, and Fitzgerald, as well as utility infielder Leo Durocher and legendary barkeep Martin Dooley. He shares his deepest beliefs about the state of literature and its role in society, along the way painting a chilling portrait of the early 1950s, Joe McCarthy’s heyday, when many American writers were blacklisted and ruined for saying similar things to what Algren is saying here.

Nelson Algren was a renowned writer, known for his penetrating and influential social novels such as The Man With the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side. Originally published in 1935, Somebody in Boots was Algren’s first novel, based on his experiences living in Texas during the Great Depression. A wonderful companion to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, this new edition of Somebody in Boots features an introduction by Colin Asher, who has written a new biography of Algren.

A boxer finds himself the targeted victim of a vindictive group in the story of one man’s battle against injustice in the dark underworld of urban America.

The Devil’s Stocking is the story of Ruby Calhoun, a boxer accused of murder in a shadowy world of low-purse fighters, cops, con artists, and bar girls. Chronicling a battle for truth and human dignity which gives way to a larger story of life and death decisions, literary grandmaster Nelson Algren’s last novel is a fitting capstone to a long and brilliant career.

The fiction and reportage included in The Last Carousel, one of the final collections published during Nelson Algren’s lifetime, was written on ships and in ports of call around the world, and includes accounts of brothels in Vietnam and Mexico, stories of the boxing ring, and reminiscences of Algren’s beloved Chicago White Sox, among other subjects. In this collection, not just Algren’s intensity but his diversity are revealed and celebrated.

Winner of the first National Book Award in 1950, this modern classic takes us into the gritty underbelly of post–World War II America. It is the story of “Frankie Machine,” a veteran, drug addict, and card-dealer in an illicit poker game being run in Chicago’s near northwest side. Frankie has just returned from the federal prison for narcotics addicts in Louisville, Kentucky, where he was exposed to all the pressures, anxieties, and temptations that had put him there in the first place.

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, bedeviled, 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.

O. Henry and National Book Award-winning author Nelson Algren has inspired thousands with his tough, gritty accounts of urban life. Written over the course of four decades, this collection of 12 stories centers around Depression-era Texas. Characterized by small-town strife, political corruption and frontier-style justice, each tale is a testament to the struggles of the working poor. Also among the stories is a retelling of the myth of Bonnie and Clyde.