SOURCE: An introduction to Erik Dorn, The University of Chicago Press, 1963, pp. vii–xvii,

In the following introductory essay to Hecht's Eric Dorn, Algren assesses the work as prophetic of American cultural decline and existential angst.

We don't even know what living means now, what it is and what it is called,” one of Dostoevski's isolated pellets of humanity warns us. “Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join onto, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We are oppressed at being men—men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive some sort of an impossible generalized man. We are stillborn and for generations past have been begotten, not...