Editing Nelson Algren (section)

===Literary career and marriage===
Algren wrote his first story, "So Help Me", in 1933, while he was in Texas working at a gas station.  Before returning to Chicago, he was caught stealing a typewriter from an empty classroom at Sul Ross State University in Alpine. He boarded a train for his getaway but was apprehended and returned to Alpine. He was held in jail for nearly five months and faced a possible additional three years in prison. He was released, but the incident made a deep impression on him. It deepened his identification with outsiders, has-beens, and the general failures who later populated his fictional world.

In 1935 Algren won the first of his three [[O. Henry Awards]] for his short story, "The Brother's House." The story was first published in ''[[Story (magazine)|Story]]'' magazine and was reprinted in an anthology of O. Henry Award winners.

His first novel, ''[[Somebody in Boots]]'' (1935), was later dismissed by Algren as primitive and politically naive, claiming he infused it with [[Marxist]] ideas he little understood, because they were fashionable at the time. The book was unsuccessful and went out of print.
 
Algren married Amanda Kontowicz in 1937. He had met her at a party celebrating the publication of ''[[Somebody in Boots]]''. They eventually would divorce and remarry before divorcing a second and final time.

His second novel, ''Never Come Morning'' (1942), was described by [[Andrew O'Hagan]] in 2019 as "the book that really shows the Algren style in its first great flourishing." It portrays the dead-end life of a doomed young [[Polish-American]] boxer turned criminal.<ref name="O'Hagan">{{cite news|last=O'Hagan|first=Andrew|url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/11/07/nelson-algren-singing-back-streets/|title=Singing the Back Streets|work=The New York Review of Books|date=November 7, 2019|access-date=October 21, 2019}} {{subscription required}}</ref> [[Ernest Hemingway]], in a July 8, 1942, letter to his publisher [[Maxwell Perkins]], said of the novel: "I think it very, very good. It is as fine and good stuff to come out of Chicago." The novel offended members of Chicago's large Polish-American community, some of whose members denounced it as pro-[[Axis powers|Axis]] propaganda. Not knowing that Algren was of partly Jewish descent, some incensed Polish-American Chicagoans said he was pro-[[Nazi]] Nordic. His Polish-American critics persuaded Mayor [[Edward Joseph Kelly]] to ban the novel from the [[Chicago Public Library]].