Nelson Algren - Personal Life

Personal Life

Nelson Algren married Amanda Kontowicz in 1937. He had met her at a party celebrating the publication of Somebody in Boots. They eventually would divorce and remarry before divorcing a second and final time.

Algren had an affair with Simone de Beauvoir. The couple summered together in Algren's cottage in the lake front community of Miller Beach, Indiana and also traveled to Latin America together in 1949. In her novel The Mandarins (1957), Beauvoir wrote of Algren (who is 'Lewis Brogan' in the book):

At first I found it amusing meeting in the flesh that classic American species: self-made leftist writer. Now, I began taking an interest in Brogan. Through his stories, you got the feeling that he claimed no rights to life and that nevertheless he had always had a passionate desire to live. I liked that mixture of modesty and eagerness.

Algren expected the world's most famous feminist to love him in a traditional way, with the man being dominant, but Beauvoir's relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre dominated her life. Algren and Beauvoir eventually became disenchanted with each other, and a bitter Algren wrote of Beauvoir and Sartre in a Playboy Magazine article about a trip he took to North Africa with Beauvoir, that she and Sartre were bigger users of others than a prostitute and her pimp in their way.

In 1965, he met Betty Ann Jones while teaching at the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop. They married that year and divorced in 1967. According to Kurt Vonnegut, who taught with him at Iowa in 1965, Algren's "enthusiasm for writing, reading and gambling left little time for the duties of a married man."