Colin Asher has written a deeply researched, moving account of a great writer's life. Nelson Algren was a titanic talent, a mid-twentieth-century comet of a novelist who lit up the literary landscape for two decades, then mysteriously darkened and all but disappeared. Asher's biography goes a long ways towards explaining why.--Russell Banks, author of Continental Drift and Cloudsplitter Absorbing. [Asher] scrupulously attempts to separate facts from myths . as he explores how a writer who produced prose-poetry of such a high order could now be largely forgotten.--Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies, New York Times Book Review [W]onderfully readable. In Asher, [Algren] gets the biographer any writer dreams of: thorough, smart, [and] literate.

--Jonathan Dee, New Yorker "[L]evelheaded and illuminating. Never a Lovely So Real has heft and heart, and it displays the sort of respect and loyalty to its subject that the novelist paid to the struggling, real-life people he put into his books.--Thomas Mallon, Wall Street Journal [A] work of love and prodigious research and, as such, deserves to be honored.--Vivian Gornick, author of The Odd Woman and the City, The New Republic [D]evotional and beautifully written . its sentences captur[es] the very same mix of lyricism and street, hard truths and sentimentality that made Algren himself so special.--Dan Simon, The Nation Nelson Algren is one of those fascinating, almost mythical figures in twentieth-century arts and letters, and Colin Asher's fine biography brings him to life with breathless intensity. It also provides the necessary corrective to Algren's hitherto misrepresented and misunderstood life and work and restores him to the rightful position he should occupy in American literature.--Deirdre Bair, National Book Award-winning author of Samuel Beckett: A Biography and Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography Easily the best biography of the great Nelson Algren, and an extraordinary book in its own right, Never a Lovely So Real reads like a novel about the strange and wayward life of a determined outsider.

More than any first-rate American novelist of the postwar era, Algren has fallen through the cracks. Colin Asher is a wonderful storyteller, and I applaud his heroic project, in a callous phase of our national history, to restore the reputation of a writer who evoked the singular dignity of the lowliest human lives.--Blake Bailey, author of Cheever: A Life A magnificently thorough and sensitive study of one of the great authors in twentieth-century America. Colin Asher's engrossing biography explores why Algren spoke for those who could not speak for themselves and demonstrates why we desperately need a voice like his today.--Paul Buhle, author of Marxism in the United States [V]igorous, poetic.[A] generous, stylish portrait of an impulsive, directionless outsider who nonetheless established a place among the lions of mid-twentieth-century American literature.--Publishers Weekly (starred review) As he presents Algren as a seminal American writer focused on injustice in this captivating, redefining, and sharply relevant biography, Asher also reveals how the insidious abuse of power by the federal government destroys lives.--Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review).