Nonconformity: Writing on Writing is a book-length essay by Nelson Algren, intended for publication in 1953 but released posthumously in 1996 by Seven Stories Press. Kurt Vonnegut called it, "A handbook for tough, truth-telling outsiders who are proud, as was Algren, to damn well stay that way."

Overview

The bulk, written between 1951 and 1953, presents Algren's philosophy as a writer, especially in the context of McCarthyism. The book was demanded by and given in June 1953 to his then-publisher Doubleday, but possibly due to the pressure of the FBI's then-ongoing investigation of Algren,[1] Doubleday rejected it in September.[1] Algren then sent it to his agent, but the manuscript was either lost in the mail or intercepted by the FBI,[1] and the text salvaged from a carbon copy. In 1956, Algren gave those carbons to Van Allen Bradley,[1] the Chicago Daily News editor who had commissioned the essay that inspired the book.

Excerpts were published as "Things of the Earth: A Groundhog View" (in The California Quarterly, Autumn 1952) and as "Great Writing Bogged Down in Fear, Says Novelist Algren"[1] (in the Chicago Daily News, December 3, 1952).

Added to the original essay is a memoir on the making of the 1955 film version of his novel The Man with the Golden Arm.

References

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