Nonconformity (book)

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."

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.

Wikiquote has quotations related to Nonconformity: Writing on Writing.

• Nonconformity at Seven Stories Press

This article about a biographical book on writers or poets is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

• v
• t
• e