<div dir="ltr"><div>All,</div><div>Please find attached and below Josh Sopriaz's review of Nelson Algren's novel, <i>Never Come Morning</i></div><div>Happy New Year</div><div>Duncan</div><div><br></div><div>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:200%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><b><i><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:200%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Never
Come Morning</span></i></b><b><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:200%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"> (2021 Edition) by Nelson Algren<span> </span><span></span></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:200%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><b><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:200%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Reviewed
by Josh Sopiarz, Governors State University<span></span></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;text-indent:0.5in;line-height:200%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><i><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:200%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Never
Come Morning </span></i><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:200%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">is Nelson Algren’s novel about a group of
young Polish street toughs who play against other teams of street gangs in an
unsanctioned baseball league on Chicago’s Northwest Side during the Great
Depression. The team’s star pitcher, Bruno “Lefty” Bicek, is also skilled in
the boxing ring. While baseball provides him with a team, camaraderie, and even
support and protection in a tough neighborhood, it is boxing, he believes, that
will grant him exit from the slums. If there is anything we can learn from
Gerald Gems’ recent book on sport and civic identity in Chicago, it is that the
city and its sports during the early and middle twentieth century were severely
segregated. This new edition brings that point to bear, emphasizes others, and
collects new features not seen in previous iterations of the novel. <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;text-indent:0.5in;line-height:200%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:200%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">On
April 19, 1942—between its initial publication and Algren’s deployment to
France—a review in the <i>Chicago Daily Tribune</i> described the characters in
his most recent and otherwise “poignant” novel, <i>Never Come Morning</i>, as
“completely without morals, completely without morale” who “personify only
brute force, brute will, and brute instinct” (17). Upon publication of the
book, the President of the Polish Roman Catholic Union petitioned to have it
banned as anti-Polish propaganda whose author was a “product of a distorted
mentality” (xi). These are, with the benefit of hindsight, somewhat brutish
assessments of Algren and his novel since, although it is true the novel is
mostly bereft of sentiment, its characters and its author are not so inhuman as
the <i>Tribune</i> and the Church would have readers believe. This is evident
in the novel’s opening epigraph comprised of lines from Walt Whitman’s poem
“You Felons on Trial in Courts” from <i>Leaves of Grass</i>: <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;text-indent:0.5in;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span>I feel I am of them—<br>
<span> </span>I belong to those
convicts and prostitutes myself—<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;text-indent:0.5in;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span>And henceforth I will not deny them—
<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;text-indent:0.5in;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span>For how can I deny myself?<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;text-indent:0.5in;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:200%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:200%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Algren’s
characters may very well have been facsimiles of real people trapped in the all-too-familiar
and vicious cycle of poverty and violence in urban America. And even if they
are whole-cloth creations, their struggles reflect those of the material world
and Algren demonstrates that just as expertly. Without question there is
brutality here, but empathy also lurks just beneath the city’s grit and
corroded patina.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;text-indent:0.5in;line-height:200%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:200%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">This
edition adds noteworthy material not included in previous reprints to the
cleanly reproduced text of Algren’s novel. Richard Wright penned a lengthy introduction
to the novel that was “lost,” has since been recovered, and is included in the
new edition. Other material like Kurt Vonnegut’s introduction from 1986, are
reprinted, too. This is a novel that Jean-Paul Sartre translated into French
and, depending on the edition you hold, the frontispiece brags that Ernest
Hemingway called it either “the greatest novel” or “the best book” to “come out
of Chicago.” Hemingway esteemed Algren, whom he dubbed the “Bard of the
Stumblebum,” so maybe it is true he called the work both. In any case, today,
for the first time since 1996, a new edition of the novel is available for
readers to see for themselves what the hullabaloo was, and still <i>is</i>, all
about. <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;text-indent:0.5in;line-height:200%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:200%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Given
boxing’s relatively low standing in contemporary America and the scant
attention paid to the extant body of boxing fiction, it is a surprise Algren’s <i>Never
Come Morning </i>received yet another reissue at all. The Richard Wright
introduction is interesting and a beneficial addition most notable for its
contemporaneous Marxist critiques of pre-War America, but it alone does not
seem enough to merit a reprint eighty years after its initial publication.
Also, there is no explicit mention of this being an anniversary printing even
though its release coincides with such an occasion. Between 2015 and 2017, it
is true, Routledge published a series of three “Lost Urban Classics” including <i>The
Golden Vanity</i>, <i>Philadelphia: Patricians and Philistines, 1900-1950</i>,
and Aben Kandel’s boxing novel from 1936, <i>City for Conquest</i>. <i>Never
Come Morning</i> might seem a good candidate for that series, but is instead
republished here, without Routledge affiliation, by Seven Stories Press which,
according to its online mission statement, publishes “works of the imagination
and political titles by voices of conscience.” Although this reissue owes in
part to its politics, its republication extends beyond the strictly political
and stands as an unheralded and superb example of the role of sport in mid-century
American culture. It is sure to pique the interest of any reader for whom that
kind of work is important. <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;text-indent:0.5in;line-height:200%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:200%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:200%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:200%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Algren,
Nelson. Never Come Morning. Seven Stories Press, 2021. Paperback, $16.95. <span></span></span></p>
</div><div><div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">Remember to smell the roses as you recumber past<br><br>Duncan R. Jamieson, Ph. D.<br>Professor of History<br>Book Review Editor<br><i>AETHLON: The Journal of Sport Literature</i><br>Ashland University<br>Ashland, OH 44805<br>USA<br></div></div></div></div>