Literary Career
Algren wrote his first story, "So Help Me", in 1933, while he was in Texas working at a gas station. Before returning home, he was caught stealing a typewriter from an abandoned classroom. For this, he spent nearly five months behind bars and faced a possible three additional years in jail. Fortunately for Algren, he was released, but the incident made a deep impression on him. It deepened his identification with outsiders, has-beens, and the general failures who later populated his fictional world.
Algren won the first of his three O. Henry Awards for his short story "The Brother's House" in 1935. The story had appeared in Story Magazine and was reprinted in an anthology of O. Henry Award winners.
Read more about this topic: Nelson Algren
Famous quotes containing the words literary and/or career:
“The [Loyal] legion has taken the place of the club—the famous Cincinnati Literary Club—in my affections.... The military circles are interested in the same things with myself, and so we endure, if not enjoy, each other.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)