SOURCE: "Nelson Algren: The Iron Sanctuary," in American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity, Hill and Wang, 1958, pp. 187-94.

In the following excerpt, Geismar comments on Algren's focus on character development in The Neon Wilderness.

The stories in The Neon Wilderness (1948) are in a softer vein [than Algren's other books]. For the first time women appear here, not only as credible human beings, but as a source of comfort and aid, however briefly, in the fast run between the womb and the grave. There is the sketch, reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson's Midwestern vein, of the workingman who gambles and drinks his week's pay away on Saturday night because his wife had not been home to meet him; but she comforts him with her flesh at the end. "So nothing important has been lost after all." There is the stupid miserable creature who calls herself "the girl that men forgot...