Today’s episode is brought to you by Joe Engleman, about novelist Nelson Algren. His “epic poem” Chicago: City on the Make may be the best literary love letter to the city. His short story collection, The Neon Wilderness, has many stories that capture Division Street after the war. His stories came from embedding himself with the people no one else seemed to be interested in — boxers, boozers, barflies, gamblers, hustlers, sex workers, and tramps. During the Great Depression, Algren worked for the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration. For two decades, he was spied on by the FBI for being an active communist and a vocal critic of the Vietnam War. He had a long-term romantic and intellectual relationship with the French feminist, philosopher, and writer Simone de Beauvior. After their break-up and as he grew older, Algren developed and deployed a hard-bitten, embittered, cynical, and at times misogynistic public persona — not unlike the persona Ernest Hemingway established for himself – that obscured how approachable and supportive of young artists he was. If you aren’t planning on picking up one of his books, maybe you can learn about Algren from the tours of Chicago he’d give. First, he’d take you to Cook County Jail to see the electric chair, then onto the race track to play the ponies, then he might take you to see Gwendolyn Brooks or Studs Terkel, before closing out the day with the taverns out west on Madison Street or closer to his West Evergreen Avenue apartment. To him, that'd be a pretty good Chicago day. Joe Engleman is a Chicago-based writer and his website is http://joeengleman.com/