Customer Reviews

Chicago: City on the Make: 50th Anniversary Edition, Newly Annotated

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4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
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This is the book that the Chicago Chamber of Commerce didn't want the world to see. Instead of pumping up the tourism and real estate industries with promotional-pamphlet blather, Algren's essay presents the real history and state of Chicago: the back alleys, the dispossessed, the swindlers dressed up in their Prarie Avenue finery, the kill-or-be-killed ethos of this cutthroat "trader's town." Seldom has indignation been so lyrical.

Although I have lived in Chicago for many years now, I am not a native Chicagoan, and I have to say that the attitudes and visions of Chicago that one finds in Nelson Algren's are not held by most of the people I have gotten to know well in Chicago. But, then, most of the people I know are also not native Chicagoans. The swagger, the love-hate, the cynicism, and the love and civic pride that manage to emerge despite the cynical pessimism are very definitely found in many of those I have come to know who were born and raised in the city.

Nelson Algren's Chicago was one that was more strictly American than it is today, less international, more Midwestern, more radical, less conventional. It is a Chicago that in many ways no longer exists. This can be felt in the book's narrative voice. Algren writes in a prose that sounds like Carl Sandburg drenched in Baudelaire, and the various sections of the book sound more than anything like the kind of stuff that Baudelaire would have written had he strolled the streets of Chicago rather than Paris. The prose is always unique, frequently beautiful, oftentimes stunning. There are definitely times that it will be all but impenetrable to someone not well schooled in Chicago's geography and its history. If one really wanted to get all the references and historical citations, one should consider reading Donald Miller's CITY OF THE CENTURY, which will clue one in on most of the 19th century and more obscure references.

But in a sense, being able to identify all the names and places isn't all that crucial. The heart of the book is intelligible regardless. An essential literary work about one of the world's great cities, by one of its great writers.

The city of big shoulders is my home, so perhaps I am too biased to write an objective review. In my opinion, however, I think this is one of the most gorgeous pieces of literature ever written.

I saw this performed live on the rooftop of a South Michigan Ave loft as the sun set over the west side and is started to rain. The little intertwined stories and metaphors and moments of beauty make the book a read that tastes tremendous on your tongue.

THE WARNING: yes, here is is. This is a prose poem. It's not a collection of short stories or a novel. It reads quite easily, but if you are turned off by that sort of thing, skip this book. There are moments of slightly inaccessible, albeit wonderful, language and it helps to know your history..

That said, if you love Chicago as I do, you will love Algren's City on the Make...

This is a magnificent prose poem-eulogy even- by Nelson Algren to his city.
He takes you through all the characters and diverse cultures and corruptions that ingrained the Chicago he grew up in and are either being erased from the image the commercial big guns want to promote,or have just fallen by the wayside.
There's a lot of visceral anger coming through in this book, and it is significant that Algren wrote it during the odious McCarthy anti Communist witch trails that was stiffling the freedoms of speech Algren so valued (he dumped his communist party interests as soon as the lack of free thought became obvious to him-now 'free' society was doing the same!)and distorting and promoting a mythical America that just didn't exist outside of a Disney film!
The afterword and annotations in the 50th anniversary edition are vital to get the maximum from this book. Algren re articulates what his views are, and -to my mind-makes a postumous apology to his friend Richard Wright who he slammed for leaving Chicago for Paris and 'not sticking it out'. What could one black man who had suffered a life time of rejection and abuse do but say he'd had enough. I liked Algren the better for this acknowledgement.

I had the pleasure of reading Chicago: City on the Make in part, on a hot summer's day sitting in the back of a moving van with the door open, using a cargo strap as a seat belt. Riding along to the next job reading my first Algren made it an afternoon of twists and turns literal and figurative.

As others have pointed out, this book is not a novel, novella or story collection, but a prose poem. They say it like that is a bad thing; as if any potential reader is such an idiot that the book should be printed with an I.Q.-based warning label ("Warning: unless you can handle Sartre in the original, this book might make your eyes bleed"). The book is a prose poem but so what? It's one of those rare and sometimes great books that can be read aloud for the language alone and for the most part, Algren makes every word about the cold wind off the river and the deep corruption count. When he is at his best, he makes the place sound positively holy--like something that glows.

Chicago: City on the Make was like nothing I had ever read then and it is vastly unlike anything I have read since. I am re-buying it for someone else to read (a Chicago native, in fact) but I'm going to get to peek into it again before I give it to him. Chicago: City on the Make is more than just a book it is an experience, a way of doing things that only top-flight, internationally famous authors have the stones to write anymore.

My experience of the book is old, in fact, so old, so that I remember only a few words from a few lines clearly and I am left with two major impressions in memory. The first is that it was a brilliant thing, fully worthy of being called "literature.'

The second was that after an amazing job of keeping his prose flying high above what other authors could ever hope for, the thing bogs down in the end. Algren's voice becomes tired, his segues more and more stretched until there's nothing left of the energy you find in the beginning, but you soon find that you can't really blame him. Algren was not up to the task of finishing his amazing slender volume, but you can't blame him for it: it is certain that no one else could have done any part of it at all.

For a great American writer like Algren and with his love of the city, one could expect more. Perhaps this sort of loose style (it has been called a prose poem) just wasn't his forte. The book starts off strong, but breaks into highly personal memories, and gets a little slow as he covers the same ground again and again. In short, it needed editing. Many of the references are so particular that they don't translate well and have aged poorly- Algren failed to find the universal like Whitman did.

Don't let this book turn you off to Algren's superb fiction writing. He remains a giant in American literature. This just wasn't his day.

Algren poetically describes how he sees Chicago; as a city that was and is a home for "hustlers" looking to make an easy buck. As the book progresses, he elaborates on what he perceives as the loss of edginess in the city's writers, as well as condemning a number of the other social maladies of the time (the HUAC being foremost among them).

I bought it as a critique.


I read it as a love-letter.


I will remember it as the myth we keep telling ourselves...

Algren breaks down Chicago in a real way. Written in 1951 the book was banned in Chicago originally, even though it's really a lovesong to the city. Algen celebrates the gamblers, grifters, sceneshifters, writers & fighters. The book was also an answer to Carl Sandburg's CHICAGO poem as well. The result is an 80 page prose poem in 7 chapters. This is a brilliant short book.

Nelson Algren expresses a vision of a city in Chicago: City on the Make like no other New York or Los Angeles had been envisioned. Chicago is shown as a city of two natures. Algren magnifies this duality of his town through the imagery and diction of his description of Chicago's physical appearance, historical figures and the divisions of the hustler and the square which show how this twofold nature creates Algren's ambiguous admiration for his city: Chicago.