Entrapment and Other Writings Read Free

Liu, Jon Gilbert, and Ruth Weiner all did outstanding work beyond the call of duty on this project and on the Algren Centennial Project generally. Filmmaker Hugo Perez volunteered to be a part of the Algren Centennial before asking a single question as to whether this might be a wise or a foolhardy thing to do. Russell Banks, Don DeLillo, Matt Dillon, Estelle Parsons, and, especially, Barry Gifford likewise threw themselves onto the barricades, taking action clearly before taking the time to think clearly. Our families, too, deserve thanks, since living with people making books is never as much fun as it sounds. To all these, for their reckless humanity, thank you.
    —Dan Simon and Brooke Horvath

A NOTE ON TEXT SELECTION
1
    Many of the hundreds of stories and vignettes or articles that Algren wrote found their way into magazines, from the
Anvil
, the
New Masses
, the
Nation, Partisan Review
, and
Story
early on, to
Esquire
, the
Saturday Evening Post
, the
Chicago Tribune Book World
, the
New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Playboy, Cavalier
, and other men’s magazines. Eventually, scenes described in the magazine pieces showed up in Algren’s many novels and nonfiction books, and a few notably appeared more than once in slightly revised versions.
    But, importantly, some of Algren’s very best writing never appeared anywhere and was left finished but completely unpublished in his archive at the Special Collections library at Ohio State University. Some of Algren’s finest stories and essays were published once, either in obscure or major magazines, then weren’t collected in book form, and so were lost. And Algren never finished the novel he set about writing right after
The Man with the Golden Arm
, despite wrestling with it for several years, leaving hundreds of pages of drafts to gather dust among his papers, including long fragments that were tantalizingly good.
    The never-published story masterpiece “The Lightless Room,” written around 1939, was one of the major works left in a clean, finished copy in the archive and never before published anywhere. Previously uncollected stories include one of his best early stories, “Forgive Them, Lord”; and two late great stories, “There Will BeNo More Christmases” and “Walk Pretty All the Way”; among many other short works of fiction and nonfiction. The unfinished novel is, of course,
Entrapment
, with which Algren struggled for much of the early 1950s. He never completed the novel, only separating out a brilliant section he gave to
Playboy
in 1957, and a longer version of the same scenes that he inserted, almost hidden from view, all the way at the back of his giant 1973 collection of fiction and nonfiction,
The Last Carousel
.
    We include all the above-mentioned pieces of writing—and much, much more—in the present volume and would argue for it as an essential Algren text, one that adds intimacies and fresh insight amounting to a significant contribution to Algren’s known output, already one of the most prolific in American literature. Returning again to
Entrapment
, the two long sections we chose will give the reader some sense of the ambition Algren had for the novel. It was to include at its core a romantically improbable couple and, towards the end this couple was to split to reveal a lonely man and a woman who escapes. Had it been completed
Entrapment
might have turned out to be Algren’s comical tragical masterpiece; it would in any case have been the one in which a woman’s voice is heard most resoundingly and in which the woman whose voice is heard manages to save herself.
    Algren rewrote himself constantly, and returned frequently to certain human situations. In preparing the present version, we were faced with a dilemma. In cases where Algren had clearly chosen his own definitive versions of a scene, such as the famous lineup scene in the story “The Captain Has Bad Dreams,” from
The Neon Wilderness
, which Algren himself rewrote into