SOURCE: "Maverick in American Letters," in The New Republic, Vol. 170, January 19, 1974, pp. 23-4.

In the following review of The Last Carousel, Maloff faults Algren's overblown prose, his self-indulgence, and the repetitive nature of the stories in the volume.

No writer has been more relentlessly faithful to his scene and cast of characters than Nelson Algren. His scene is the "wild side," the "neon wilderness," the seamier sprawls of Chicago and its spiritual extensions across this broad land—America as Chicago. And his characters are the drifters and grifters, clowns and carnies, pimps and pushers, hustlers and hookers, gamblers and touts, junkies and lushes, marks and victims, conmen and shills, freaks and grotesques—the born losers who constitute a half-world, an anti-society to the society that never appears, not even as a sensed or felt presence, in Algren's work. Over the four decades of his life as a writer...