As rock and roll novelist Tom Carson writes in his introduction The Neon Wilderness is the
pivotal book of Nelson Algren's career--the one which bid a subdued but determined farewell to
everything that had earlier made him no more than just another good writer and inaugurated the
idiosyncratic bedevilled cantankerously poetic sensibility that would see him ranked among
the few literary originals of his times. Algren's classic 1947 short story collection is the
pure vein Algren would mine for all his subsequent novels and stories. The stories in this
collection are literary triumphs that don't fade away. Among the stories included here are A
Bottle of Milk for Mother about a Chicago youth being cornered for a murder and The Face on
the Barrome Floor in which a legless man pummels another man nearly to death--the seeds that
would grow into the novel Never Come Morning. Algren's World War II stories whose final
expression would be in the novel The Man with the Golden Arm are also part of this collection.
So Help Me Algren's first published work is here. Other stories include The Captain Has Bad
Dreams in which Algren first introduced the character of the blameless captain who feels such
a heavy burden of guilt and wonders why the criminal offenders he sees seem to feel no guilt at
all. And then there is Design for Departure in which a young woman drifting into hooking and
addiction sees her own dreaminess outlasting her hopes.
