SOURCE: "Chicago without Tears or Dreams," in The Saturday Review, Vol. 30, February 8, 1947, p. 14.

In the review of The Neon Wilderness below, Brown praises Algren's portrayal of the downtrodden and discusses the plots of various stories.

The challenge of the short story must be infinitely compelling to those writers willing to meet it. The demands of a limited scope make incident, character, and mood tight and tellingly heightened. Economy of things said, of those things left unsaid, can be memorable when practised well. Chekhov in three pages paints a portrait; Hemingway does an entire underworld story in not many words; O. Henry gives us middle-class goodness; and Saroyan makes man's loneliness a poignant dream. It is the author's undercurrent theme in any good collection of short stories that serves to unite the whole.

In [The Neon Wilderness] Mr. Algren cries out for the under-dog. It is, in a quote...