Algren at Sea: Notes from a Sea Diary & Who Lost an American?#Travel Writings

by Nelson Algren

Overview

Nelson Algren's two travel writing books describe his journeys through the seamier sides of great American cities and the international social and political landscapes of the mid-1960s. Algren at Sea brings them together in one volume.

Notes from a Sea Diary offers one of the most remarkable appraisals of Ernest Hemingway ever written. Aboard the freighter Malayasia Mail, Algren ponders his personal encounter with Hemingway in Cuba and the values inherent in Hemingway’s stories as he visits the ports of Pusan, Kowloon, Bombay, and Calcutta.

Who Lost an American? is a whirlwind spin through Paris and Playboy clubs, New York publishing and Dublin pubs, Crete and Chicago, as Algren adventures with Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Brendan Behan, and Juliette Gréco.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781583228418
Publisher:	Seven Stories Press
Publication date:	01/06/2009
Edition description:	Centennial ed.
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

One of the most neglected of modern American authors and also one of the best loved, NELSON ALGREN (1909–1981) believed that “literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.” His own voluminous body of work stands up to that belief. Algren’s powerful voice rose from the urban wilderness of postwar Chicago, and it is to that city of hustlers, addicts and scamps that he returned again and again, eventually raising Chicago’s “lower depths” up onto a stage for the whole world to behold. Recipient of the first National Book Award for fiction and lauded by Hemingway as “one of the two best authors in America,” Algren remains among our most defiant and enduring novelists. His work includes five major novels, two short fiction collections, a book-length poem and several collections of reportage. A source of inspiration to artists as diverse as Kurt Vonnegut and Donald Barthelme, Studs Terkel and Lou Reed, Algren died on May 9, 1981, within days of his appointment as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Table of Contents

Who Lost an American?

Acknowledgments 10

New York: Rapietta Greensponge Girl Counselor, Comes to My Aid 11

Down with All Hands: The Cruise of the SS Meyer Davis 33

The Banjaxed Land: You Have Your People and I Have Mine 45

The South of England: They Walked Like Cats that Circle and Come Back 61

Paris: They're Hiding the Ham on the Pinball King or Some Came Stumbling 77

Barcelona: The Bright Enormous Morning 101

Almeria: Show Me a Gypsy and I'll Show You a Nut 131

Seville: The Peseta with the Hole in the Middle 137

Crete: There's Lots of Crazy Stuff in the Ocean 153

Istanbul: When a Muslim Makes His Violin Cry, Head for the Door 163

Chicago I The Night-Colored Rider 181

Chicago II If You Got the Bread You Walk 201

Chicago III If I Can't Sell It I'll Keep Settin' On It; I Jest Won't Give it Away (Old Song) 211

Chicago IV The Irishman in the Grotto, the Man in the Iron Suit, And the Girl in Gravity-Z: The Playboy Magazine Story or Mr. Peepers as Don Juan 229

Epilogue: Tricks Out of Times Long Gone 267

Notes From a Sea Diary: Hemingway All the Way

Acknowledgments 271

Prefatory 273

June 21, 1962: Two Hours Out of the Port of Seattle 279

June 22nd 281

June 27th: Lions, Lionesses, Deadbone Crunchers 285

June 29th: East China Sea: We Didn't Come to Gamble 295

July 1st: 472 Cho-Ryang-Dong: A Parlor Once Purple Now Faded to Rose 299

July 4th: East China Sea 309

July 6th: South China Sea, Two Days from the Port of Hongkong. Dingding, Hinkletinkle, the Finkified Lasagna and the Man Too Timid to Damn 313

July 9th: Concannon Gets the Ship in Trouble or Assy-endUp on Ho-Phang Road 319

July 13th: Indian Ocean: "I Can See You Have Been Wounded" 333

July 14th: Rafts of a Summer Night 341

July 15th: Arabian Sea 349

Port of Bombay

I Into the Gala Day 355

July 15th: Port of Bombay II. Kamathipura 369

July 17th: Port of Bombay III. Kalyani-of-the-Four-Hundred 377

July 22nd: Arabian Sea 385

Night in the Gardens of Horn & Hardart

Hemingway and Lardner 393

II Hemingway Himself 397

III The Real Thing in Kitsch 401

July 25th: Bay of Bengal 407

The Quais of Calcutta 415

Kanani Mansions 431

Epilogue: Quais of Calcutta 461

About the Author 463