About the Author:
Robert Ward lectures in American literature at St. Martin’s College, Lancaster, UK. He earned his doctorate from the University of Leeds in 2001 and has research interests in American literature of the 1930s, writing from and about prisons, and memoir. He has given papers at local and international conferences, and written articles, in all of these areas.

Nelson Algren was one of the most important, though critically undervalued, American writers of his generation. But since his death in 1981, his major fictional writings and essays have increasingly attracted serious biographical and scholarly attention. This collection of eleven essays on Algren offers a diverse and lively range of theoretical and historical readings. These include discussions on Algren’s place in Chicago’s left-wing literary tradition, the aesthetic of American and European naturalism, and his reaction to, and reception in the Cold War milieu of the 1940s and 1950s. Consideration is also given to the ways in which paperback cover designs up to and during this Cold War period shaped the reception of Algren’s novels as pulp fiction. Algren’s words are further illuminated by theories of Walter Benjamin, and those associated with confinement, autobiography, post-colonialism, and the cultural politics of American carnival.

The FDU Press has particular strengths in literary studies, world history and politics, biography, film, ethnic studies, sociology, the Civil War, art, religion, local history, and urban studies.