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The Last Carousel
The fiction and reportage included in The Last Carousel, one of the final collections published during Nelson Algren’s lifetime, was written on ships and in ports of call around the world, and includes accounts of brothels in Vietnam and Mexico, stories of the boxing ring, and reminiscences of Algren’s beloved Chicago White Sox, among other subjects. In this collection, not just Algren’s intensity but his diversity are revealed and celebrated.
- GenresFiction
Audible Audio
First published November 28, 1973
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About the author
Nelson Algren
64 books285 followersPeople note American writer Nelson Algren for his novels, including
The Man with the Golden Arm
(1949), about the pride and longings of impoverished people.
Born of Swedish-immigrant parents, Nelson Ahlgren Abraham moved at an early age to Chicago. At University of Illinois, he studied journalism. His experiences as a migrant worker during the Depression provided the material for his first Somebody in Boots (1935). Throughout life, Algren identified with the underdog. From 1936 to 1940, the high-point of left-wing ideas on the literary scene of the United States, he served as editor of the project in Illinois. After putting the finishing touches to his second, he in 1942 joined and enlisted for the war. Never Come Morning received universal acclaim and eventually sold more than a million copies.
A dark naturalist style of Algren passionately records the details of trapped urban existence with flashes of melancholy poetry. He characterizes the lowlife drifters, whores, junkies, and barflies of row. He records the bravado of their colloquial language and lays their predicament bare.
Born of Swedish-immigrant parents, Nelson Ahlgren Abraham moved at an early age to Chicago. At University of Illinois, he studied journalism. His experiences as a migrant worker during the Depression provided the material for his first Somebody in Boots (1935). Throughout life, Algren identified with the underdog. From 1936 to 1940, the high-point of left-wing ideas on the literary scene of the United States, he served as editor of the project in Illinois. After putting the finishing touches to his second, he in 1942 joined and enlisted for the war. Never Come Morning received universal acclaim and eventually sold more than a million copies.
A dark naturalist style of Algren passionately records the details of trapped urban existence with flashes of melancholy poetry. He characterizes the lowlife drifters, whores, junkies, and barflies of row. He records the bravado of their colloquial language and lays their predicament bare.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 27, 2014
Given my love of Nelson Algren's writing, I can't quite explain why I didn't come around sooner to The Last Carousel, his late collection of short stories and memoirs which was the last book published during his lifetime. Probably this was due to my general impression that the quality of his writing toward the end of his career had greatly diminished along with its considerably reduced quantity. Algren published extensively during the Forties and Fifties, with the stellar novels he Man With the Golden Arm, Never Come Morning and Walk on the Wild Side, the story collection The Neon Wilderness and the book-length essay Chicago: City on the Make. But by the late Fifties his output had slackened, for which numerous reasons have been suggested, none of which have proven completely satisfactory. Through the Sixties and early Seventies he was mostly writing magazine articles and some short stories, along with a never-completed novel, Entrapment, which was apparently the artistic millstone of his last few decades before his death in 1981.
My ignorance of The Last Carousel wasn't from lack of availability, as the book has been in print with Seven Stories Press since 1997, and an earlier edition has been on the shelf at my public library for the entire 10 years I've been a patron there. (I did check it out once but only read his hilarious piece on his Hollywood screenwriting fiasco and Otto Preminger before setting it aside and turning my focus elsewhere.) As I mentioned, my impression was that his writing had declined in his last decades, and I suppose I didn't want to sully my admiration for him by reading his less accomplished work. And now I've come to regret that presumption, because now I've finally read the book, devouring it over a few pleasant weeks and enjoying it a great deal.
To my great surprise, Algren's gift for writing - especially for fiction - was nearly as strong later on as it was during his 1940s prime. His terrific long story, "Bullring of the Summer Night", about the jockeys, owners and hangers-on at a third-rate Arkansas horsetrack, suggests that not only was Algren not wasting away his later years at the track, but that his powers of observation and description had barely diminished at all. In fact, he might have had a great horseracing novel in him had he opted to expend the effort. (In the interview collection Conversations With Nelson Algren, he suggests that after the Fifties he lost the energy and devotion for writing novels, which he figured wouldn't be appreciated anyway. He also seemed to be thoroughly enjoying his life away from writing, and dreaded being chained to a desk writing another "big book.") "Moon of the Afry Darfy" and "Watch Out for Daddy" are fine extensions of "Bullring", whose disgraced jockey Hollis Floweree is memorably depicted in "Arfy Darfy" as he drifts to Chicago and tries to pick up the pieces of his shattered life, while "Daddy" concerns two doomed addicts - a hooker and her pimp - who work out of the seedy bar where Hollis drinks.
As good as the fiction is here, though, my favorite piece in the collection is "Everything Inside Is a Penny" which despite its fictional touches appears to actually be a memoir from Algren's childhood. His warm rememberance of his South Side days - his mechanical genius father, his hectoring mother, the Catholic girl from the apartment upstairs who is young Nelson's first love, the trips to the West Side to visit his grandfather - are bracketed in preface and conclusion with a haunting description of an abandoned El station (apparently the station on the Lake Street line he passed through when visiting his grandfather) and the snowdrifts, lonely lights and memories which still linger there. The El station passages remind me quite a bit of the portions of The Man With the Golden Arm during which the lonely and forlorn Zosh whiles away her empty hours gazing out of her flophouse window at the windswept tracks outside; both invoke sadness, loss and what will never come again.
Though I'd recommend that newcomers to Algren first check out the early novels and especially Chicago: City on the Make, more seasoned Algren readers would be well-advised to check out The Last Carousel, which has plenty of great writing in its own right and is a surprisingly strong addition to his body of work.
My ignorance of The Last Carousel wasn't from lack of availability, as the book has been in print with Seven Stories Press since 1997, and an earlier edition has been on the shelf at my public library for the entire 10 years I've been a patron there. (I did check it out once but only read his hilarious piece on his Hollywood screenwriting fiasco and Otto Preminger before setting it aside and turning my focus elsewhere.) As I mentioned, my impression was that his writing had declined in his last decades, and I suppose I didn't want to sully my admiration for him by reading his less accomplished work. And now I've come to regret that presumption, because now I've finally read the book, devouring it over a few pleasant weeks and enjoying it a great deal.
To my great surprise, Algren's gift for writing - especially for fiction - was nearly as strong later on as it was during his 1940s prime. His terrific long story, "Bullring of the Summer Night", about the jockeys, owners and hangers-on at a third-rate Arkansas horsetrack, suggests that not only was Algren not wasting away his later years at the track, but that his powers of observation and description had barely diminished at all. In fact, he might have had a great horseracing novel in him had he opted to expend the effort. (In the interview collection Conversations With Nelson Algren, he suggests that after the Fifties he lost the energy and devotion for writing novels, which he figured wouldn't be appreciated anyway. He also seemed to be thoroughly enjoying his life away from writing, and dreaded being chained to a desk writing another "big book.") "Moon of the Afry Darfy" and "Watch Out for Daddy" are fine extensions of "Bullring", whose disgraced jockey Hollis Floweree is memorably depicted in "Arfy Darfy" as he drifts to Chicago and tries to pick up the pieces of his shattered life, while "Daddy" concerns two doomed addicts - a hooker and her pimp - who work out of the seedy bar where Hollis drinks.
As good as the fiction is here, though, my favorite piece in the collection is "Everything Inside Is a Penny" which despite its fictional touches appears to actually be a memoir from Algren's childhood. His warm rememberance of his South Side days - his mechanical genius father, his hectoring mother, the Catholic girl from the apartment upstairs who is young Nelson's first love, the trips to the West Side to visit his grandfather - are bracketed in preface and conclusion with a haunting description of an abandoned El station (apparently the station on the Lake Street line he passed through when visiting his grandfather) and the snowdrifts, lonely lights and memories which still linger there. The El station passages remind me quite a bit of the portions of The Man With the Golden Arm during which the lonely and forlorn Zosh whiles away her empty hours gazing out of her flophouse window at the windswept tracks outside; both invoke sadness, loss and what will never come again.
Though I'd recommend that newcomers to Algren first check out the early novels and especially Chicago: City on the Make, more seasoned Algren readers would be well-advised to check out The Last Carousel, which has plenty of great writing in its own right and is a surprisingly strong addition to his body of work.
March 30, 2020
I love Algren. I always recommend Algren. But this is collection is probably not for the casual Algren fan. This is his later work, and it's uneven, and by the time he wrote most of this, he'd become kind of a bitter old drunk a little too in love with his cleverness. He writes about gambling, boxing matches, horse racing, and hanging out in dive bars. Baseball. Being a vagabond. Junkies and other street folk. He loves squalid Chicago, and he writes about it. It's sometimes awesome, and sometimes kind of like listening to that odiferous drunk who won't leave you alone at the bar.
June 9, 2014
The Last Carousel, more than any other single collection of his work, demonstrates Nelson Algren’s range as a writer. This is all the more impressive in that most of the short stories in it were written during what could be regarded as a low point in his career : the period after A Walk on the Wild Side, when his failed involvement with Hollywood and with Simone de Beauvoir left him bitter, depressed and briefly institutionalized; and before he found the inspiration, at the end of his life, to finish The Devil’s Stocking.
Brave Bulls of Sidi Yahya is really the only story in this collection that reflects the sort of bitter mediocrity that one might expect of a “catch all” collection of previously-published short work from this period. Aimed at times a little too directly at Simone de Beauvoir for something written fifteen years after the end of their relationship, it consists mainly of Algren wisecracking his way through someone else’s vacation and has more than a whiff of sour grapes about it. Published in Playboy, which ironically Algren had criticized in 1963 for promoting a vision of life where the safety of conspicuous consumption and pornography replaced the vulnerability inherent in building human relationships, the best that can be said is that he understood his audience, and perhaps by 1972 needed a paycheck.
Fortunately, this is a drastic exception to the remainder of the book, which on the whole is a startling reminder that Algren’s failure to publish a novel between 1956 and his death in 1981 was not the product of a genius who had burned himself out by the age of 50; who was content, as he often made out, to live out his days smuggling transistor radios and transferring the proceeds directly to Chinatown brothels. Indeed, three of the later stories in The Last Carousel: Bullring of the Summer Night, Moon of the Arfy Darfy, and Watch out for Daddy, are between them the nucleus of a novel that he seems to have never quite wanted to put together, all revolving around a handful of patrons of the same dive bar whose lives cross paths like the doomed protagonists in Lifter Puller folklore. One gets the impression that Algren was still very much on top of his game, and had pulled back from more ambitious projects out of the feeling that they would have no impact, rather than that they would have no merit.
Again showing the range of the writer, we have some expository journalism mixed in with the fiction, demonstrating Algren’s ability to tell a true story straight: The Cortez Gang, an apparently factual account of injustice and corruption in West Texas at the turn of the last century, is probably the best thing never published by Harper’s. Less journalistic but every bit as true is Go! Go! Go! Forty Years Ago, covering the Black Sox Scandal with the eye of someone for whom it was clearly a formative experience, and fitting in nicely with several surprisingly heartfelt stories of growing up in Chicago at a time when streetlights were gas and winters lasted for six to eight years. These last seem more like Jean Shepherd stories, with an entirely different balance between wry humor and subtle aggression than the one that normally characterized Algren’s work, but one that is nevertheless unmistakably his own.
No review of this length can touch on more than a few of the thirty or so stories that make up The Last Carousel, but every one of them is worth reading, and most are just as powerful, moving and carefully written as the episodes that went into Algren’s novels, or The Neon Wilderness. This is enough to earn it an unqualified endorsement.
Brave Bulls of Sidi Yahya is really the only story in this collection that reflects the sort of bitter mediocrity that one might expect of a “catch all” collection of previously-published short work from this period. Aimed at times a little too directly at Simone de Beauvoir for something written fifteen years after the end of their relationship, it consists mainly of Algren wisecracking his way through someone else’s vacation and has more than a whiff of sour grapes about it. Published in Playboy, which ironically Algren had criticized in 1963 for promoting a vision of life where the safety of conspicuous consumption and pornography replaced the vulnerability inherent in building human relationships, the best that can be said is that he understood his audience, and perhaps by 1972 needed a paycheck.
Fortunately, this is a drastic exception to the remainder of the book, which on the whole is a startling reminder that Algren’s failure to publish a novel between 1956 and his death in 1981 was not the product of a genius who had burned himself out by the age of 50; who was content, as he often made out, to live out his days smuggling transistor radios and transferring the proceeds directly to Chinatown brothels. Indeed, three of the later stories in The Last Carousel: Bullring of the Summer Night, Moon of the Arfy Darfy, and Watch out for Daddy, are between them the nucleus of a novel that he seems to have never quite wanted to put together, all revolving around a handful of patrons of the same dive bar whose lives cross paths like the doomed protagonists in Lifter Puller folklore. One gets the impression that Algren was still very much on top of his game, and had pulled back from more ambitious projects out of the feeling that they would have no impact, rather than that they would have no merit.
Again showing the range of the writer, we have some expository journalism mixed in with the fiction, demonstrating Algren’s ability to tell a true story straight: The Cortez Gang, an apparently factual account of injustice and corruption in West Texas at the turn of the last century, is probably the best thing never published by Harper’s. Less journalistic but every bit as true is Go! Go! Go! Forty Years Ago, covering the Black Sox Scandal with the eye of someone for whom it was clearly a formative experience, and fitting in nicely with several surprisingly heartfelt stories of growing up in Chicago at a time when streetlights were gas and winters lasted for six to eight years. These last seem more like Jean Shepherd stories, with an entirely different balance between wry humor and subtle aggression than the one that normally characterized Algren’s work, but one that is nevertheless unmistakably his own.
No review of this length can touch on more than a few of the thirty or so stories that make up The Last Carousel, but every one of them is worth reading, and most are just as powerful, moving and carefully written as the episodes that went into Algren’s novels, or The Neon Wilderness. This is enough to earn it an unqualified endorsement.
June 22, 2019
I was expecting this to be a collection of short stories, and there were some, but it was almost equally offset by more of his semi-autobiographical "essays" about interviewing prostitutes in exotic parts of the world, and so forth. Similar to the Somebody in Boots/A Walk on the Wild Side problem, this book actually re-hashes several scenes and topics from Who Lost an American? and Notes From a Sea Diary: Hemingway All the Way, to the point where I would not recommend reading all three except for an absolute sense of completeness. Of those three, this one is probably the least boring, since it contains the most narrative fiction, but compared to his actual novels or even The Neon Wilderness, being an actual collection of short stories, this one doesn't exactly stand out.
January 25, 2019
When he's good, he's great. When it's dull, every page is a swamp. Cut about 1/3 and you'll have a jewel.
April 27, 2019
2.5; I enjoyed a few stories, but not most
September 4, 2021
Every time I read something of Algren's, I wish I could give it more than just a five star rating. I don't think there's a better writer who captured the true spirit of his time; Algren writes of the views from the streets, and not the nice, sheltered, wealthy streets. His down-and-out characters and his gritty, no-holds-barred travel writing collected here are absolutely perfect.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews