SOURCE: "A World Imagined: The Art of Nelson Algren," in American Literary Naturalism: A Reassessment, Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1975, pp. 176-96.

In the following excerpt, Lid provides an overview of Algren's career and critical reaction to his works. He also discusses the short story "A Bottle of Milk for Mother."

It is but nature to be shy of a mortal who declares that a thief in jail is as honorable a personage as Gen. George Washington.

—Melville to Hawthorne

It is not so long ago, as literary history goes, that it was convenient to speak of Nelson Algren as a literary naturalist. It gave us direction in reading his works, and provided rubrics by which to measure his achievements. In addition, Algren himself felt a kinship with such writers as Dreiser and Wright, and such personal identification made easy a view of his writings as belonging in the...