Nelson Algren (March 28, 1909 – May 9, 1981) was an American writer.
Algren was born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham in Detroit, Michigan. At the age of three he moved with his parents to Chicago, Illinois where they lived in a working-class, immigrant neighborhood on the South Side. His father was the son of a Swedish convert to Judaism and a Jewish American woman, while his mother (who owned a candy store) was of German Jewish descent. When Algren was e...
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Nelson Algren (March 28, 1909 – May 9, 1981) was an American writer.
Algren was born Nelson Ahlgren Abraham in Detroit, Michigan. At the age of three he moved with his parents to Chicago, Illinois where they lived in a working-class, immigrant neighborhood on the South Side. His father was the son of a Swedish convert to Judaism and a Jewish American woman, while his mother (who owned a candy store) was of German Jewish descent. When Algren was eight years old, his parents moved from 7139 S. South Park Avenue (now S. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive) in the far South Side neighborhood of St. Columbanus to an apartment in the Albany Park neighborhood on the North Side. Algren's father worked as an auto mechanic nearby on North Kedzie Avenue.
Algren was educated in Chicago's public schools, graduated from Hibbard High School (now Roosevelt), and went on to study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in journalism during the Great Depression...
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