ABSTRACT
Nelson Algren’s novel The Man with the Golden Arm made a literary splash upon its appearance in 1947, winning the first National Book Award. As critics such as James Giles have pointed out, the work represents a departure from the naturalism practiced in Algren’s earlier work, and it incorporates contemporary French influences from Celine (the dark humor) and from Sartre (the existentialist tinge of the work that also has much in common with Algren’s friend Richard Wright). In this, it differs from two other urban novels that attracted attention in the immediate postwar years, Willard Motleys Knock on Any Door, which is very decidedly naturalistic in a social protest vein, and Ann Petry’s The Street, which is decidedly realistic in conception and execution. The revolutionary nature of The Man with the Golden Arm is illustrated in content and style, beyond Algren’s incorporation of French influences. Part of this revolutionary nature can be seen in Algren’s use of a junky as the main character, a figure who would become almost a trope in postwar literature and film. Change can also be seen in his treatment of what Rotella sees in October Cities as “encapsulat [ting] the transformation of the urban village” (62). Similarly, in a linguistic vein, he uses terms such as “squares” and “cats,” among others, a jazz-based argot that would become more widely popularized in the next decade with the coming of the Beats. Indeed, Maxwell Geismar characterizes Algren’s language as “rich, if not ornate with the idiom of punks, cranks, and petty gangsters” (191) and asserts that “[t]he true comparison of Algren’s work may be with jazz or bebop, or rock and roll” (192). That these characters use this idiom hints at their relative isolation and ghettoization in relation to mainstream culture, just as bebop was in prewar U.S. culture.
