Essays

"If we assume for a moment that a fleshless diet is practicable, how cruel to animals, and how degrading to men, is the institution of the slaughter-house ! Having no wish to dwell on what is morbid and unpleasant, I shall not pain the feelings of my readers by harping on the sufferings which their victims undergo, but shall content myself with remarking that those good people are mistaken who imagine that the slaughter of animals is painless and merciful."

"I think it will be worth our while to inquire if there be really such great absurdity in the idea of not eating flesh, or if it be possible that the Vegetarians have reason on their side, and that the present movement in favour of a reformed diet may contain the germ of an important change. However that may be, it can do no harm to my readers if they hear what can be said in favour of Vegetarianism; then, if they are not persuaded to adopt a fleshless diet, they will have a clear conscience, and be able to enjoy their beef and mutton all the more afterwards."

"I must preface this essay by the confession that I am myself a Vegetarian, and that I mean to say all the good I can of the principles of Vegetarianism. This is rather a formidable admission to make, for a Vegetarian is still regarded, in ordinary society, as little better than a madman... Some of his friends, who take a graver view of such dietetic vagaries, feel it to be their duty to warn him boldly and explicitly that he will undoubtedly die in a short time unless he amends his ways... Others, again, are of opinion that though his bodily health may not suffer, yet his mental powers will be sapped by a fleshless diet, and he will soon sink into a state of hopeless idiocy and imbecility."

"The greatest and most unerring argument in favour of Vegetarianism is, to my mind, the utter absence of "good taste" in flesh-eating, which is revolting to all the higher instincts of the human mind."

"It appears, then, that both on economic and moral grounds there are certain very distinct advantages in a vegetarian diet, provided only that such a diet can be shown to be physically practicable."

"The river's algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting. One can't have quite as little foresight as a river. I always know generally what I want to write about. But not the specific conclusions I want to reach; from paragraph to paragraph I let the ideas take their course."

"A great deal of writing is not "plotted"—most of my essays have no plot structure, they are a ramble in the woods, or a ramble in the basement of my mind."

"Looking at Chicago after reading Chicago: City on the Make is like looking at sunflowers after seeing the Van Gogh painting – the subject has changed because of the artist's vision."

"In books such as Chicago: City on the Make (1951) his writing continued to talk of the dark underbelly of the USA, in a voice ever richer and darker."

"The famous “prose poem” Chicago: City on the Make, originally an essay in Holiday magazine, remains a pungent but sentimental overview of the city [...]. Easy to miss within it is Algren's baseline concerns: how can a society nurture literature when that society devotes itself to consumerism and war?"

"In the three years after Golden Arm, Algren wrote two short books, both nonfiction, both brilliant, unique, and unflinching in their critique of the country's changing ethos. The first, Chicago: City on the Make, is a book-length prose poem that relays Chicago's history through the lens of criminality. It may be among the most beautiful and brutally honest love letters ever written."

"If my City of the Big Shoulders / Stormy, husky, bawling / Yipping, yapping, yessing, crawling / Would only stop giggling like a farm-boy wearing earrings / On North Wells Street for the first time / Maybe we could find out what kind of joint we're living in."

"I submit that literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by a conscience in touch with humanity. [...] The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man."

"Again that hour when taxies are deadheading home / Before the trolley-buses start to run / And snowdreams in a lace of mist drift down / And paving-flares make shadows on old walls / When from asylum, barrack, cell and cheap hotel / All those whose lives were lived by someone else / Who never had a choice but went on what was left / Return along long walks where thrusts of wintry grass / By force of love have split the measured stone."

"It's hustle and bustle from day to day, chicken one day and feathers the next, and nobody knows where went."

"Yet on nights when the blood-red neon of the tavern legends tether the arc-lamps to all the puddles left from last night's rain, somewhere between the bright carnival of the boulevards and the dark girders of , ever so far and ever so faintly between the still grasses and the moving waters, clear as a cat's cry on a midnight wind, the s mourn in the river reeds once more. / The Pottawattomies were much too square. They left nothing behind but their dirty river. / While we shall leave, for remembrance, one rusty iron heart. / The city's rusty heart, that holds both the hustler and the square. / Takes them both and holds them there. / For keeps and a single day."

"Algren's Chicago, a kind of American annex to Dante's inferno, is a nether world peopled by rat-faced hustlers and money-loving demons who crawl in the writer's brilliant, sordid, uncompromising and twisted imagination."

"By days when the wind bangs alley gates ajar and the sun goes by on the wind. By nights when the moon is an only child above the measured thunder of the cars, you may know Chicago's heart at last: / You'll know it's the place built out of Man's ceaseless failure to overcome himself. Out of Man's endless war against himself we build our successes as well as our failures. Making in the city of all cities most like Man himself – loneliest creation of all this very old poor earth."

"The giants cannot come again; all the bright faces of tomorrow are careworn hustlers' faces. / And the place always gets this look of some careworn hustler's tomorrow by night, as the arch of spring is mounted and May turns into June. It is then that the women come out of the summer hotels to sit one stone step above the pavement, surveying the men curb-sitting one step below it. Between them pass the nobodies from nowhere, the nobodies nobody knows, with faces cut from the same cloth as their caps, and the women whose eyes reflect nothing but the pavement."

"A Jekyll-and-Hyde sort of burg, where one university's faculty members can protest sincerely against restrictive covenants on the blighted streets bordering their campus – not knowing that the local pay roll draws on real estate covered by covenants like a tent. Let's get back to them saints, Professor. It's awful cold out there."

"The nameless, useless nobodies who sleep behind the taverns, who sleep beneath . Who sleep in burnt-out busses with the windows freshly curtained; in winterized chicken coops or patched-up truck bodies. The useless, helpless nobodies nobody knows: that go as the snow goes, where the wind blows, there and there and there, down any old cat-and-ashcan alley at all. There, unloved and lost forever, lost and unloved for keeps and a day, [...] there were they chop kindling for heat, cook over coal stoves, still burn kerosene for light, there where they sleep the all-night movies through and wait for rain or peace or snow: there, there beats Chicago's heart. / [...] For the masses who do the city's labor also keep the city's heart."

"Town of the flagpole sitters, iron city, where everything looks so old yet the people look so young. [...] And of that adolescent who paused in his gum-chewing, upon hearing the sentence of death by electrocution passed upon him, to remember ever so softly: “Knew I'd never get to be twenny-one anyhow.”"

"An October sort of city even in spring."

"What Algren observed fifteen years ago applies today in trump. And in that prose-poem put down some twenty-odd years ago – and what odd years they've been – the ring of a city's awful truth is still heard. Only louder. As with all good poets, the guy is a prophet."

"Town of the small, cheerful apartments, the beer in the icebox, the pipes in the rack, the children well behaved and the TV well tuned, the armchairs fatly upholstered and the record albums filed: 33 rpm, 45 rpm, 78 rpm. Where the 33 rpm husband and proud father eats all his vitamin-stuffed dinner cautiously and then streaks to the bar across the street to drink himself senseless among strangers, at 78 rpm, all alone."

"Wise up, Jim: it's a joint where the bulls and the foxes live well and the lambs wind up head-down from the hook. [...] / A town where the artist of class and the swifter-type thief approach their work with the same lofty hope of slipping a fast one over on everybody and making a fast buck to boot. “If he can get away with it I give the man credit,” is said here of both bad poets and good safe-blowers."

"The city today is more a soldier's than an artist's town. [...] You can't make an arsenal of a nation and yet expect its great cities to produce artists. It's in the nature of the overbraided brass to build walls around the minds of men – as it is in the nature of the arts to tear those dark walls down."

"Make the Tribune bestseller list and the Friends of American Writers, the Friends of Literature, the Friends of Shakespeare and the Friends of Frank Harris will be tugging at your elbow, tittering down your collar, coyly sneaking an extra olive into your martini or drooling flatly right into your beer with the drollest sort of flattery and the cheapest grade of praise: the grade reserved strictly for proven winners."

"Now it's the place where we do as we're told, praise poison, bless the F.B.I., yearn wistfully for just one small chance to prove ourselves more abject than anyone yet for expenses to Washington and return – You Too Can Learn to Trap Your Man – and applaud the artist, hanging for sale beside his work, with an ancestral glee. And cannot understand how it can be that others are happier than ourselves. And why it seems that no one loves us now as they once did."

"Out of the Twisted Twenties flowered the promise of Chicago as the homeland and heartland of an American renaissance, a place of poets and sculptors to come, of singers and painters, dancers, actors and actresses of golden decades yet to be. [...] / Thirty years later we stand on the rim of a cultural Sahara with not a camel in sight. The springs dried up and the sands drifted in, and the caravans went the other way."

"The very toughest sort of town, they'll tell you – that's what makes it so American. / Yet it isn't any tougher at heart than the U.S.A. is tough at heart, for all her ships at sea. It just acts with the nervous violence of the two-timing bridegroom whose guilt is more than he can bear: the bird who tries to throw his bride off the scent by accusing her of infidelity loudly enough for the neighbors to hear. The guiltier he feels the louder he talks. That's the sort of little loud talker we have in Chicago today. He isn't a tough punk, he's just a scared one. Americans everywhere face gunfire better than guilt."

"Giants lived here once. It was the kind of town, thirty years gone, that made big men out of little ones. It was geared for great deeds then, as it is geared for small deeds now."

"You can belong to New Orleans. You can belong to Boston or San Francisco. You might conceivably – however clandestinely – belong to Phildadelphia. But you can't belong to Chicago any more than you can belong to the flying saucer called Los Angeles. For it isn't so much a city as it is a drafty hustler's junction in which to hustle awhile and move on out of the draft. / That's why the boys and girls grow up and get out."

"Big-shot town, small-shot town, jet-propelled old-fashioned town, by old-world hands with new-world tools built into a place whose heartbeat carries farther than its shout, whose whispering in the night sounds less hollow than its roistering noontime laugh: they have builded a heavy-shouldered laughter here who went to work too young. / And grew up too arrogant, too gullible, too swift to mockery and too slow to love. So careless and so soon careworn, so challenging yet secretly despairing – how can such a cocksure Johnson of a town catch anybody but a barfly's heart?"

"A town of many angry sayings, some loud and some soft; some out of the corner of the mouth and some straight off the shoulder. / “You make rifles,” the Hoosier fireman told ten thousand workingmen massed at a Socialist picnic here, “and are always at the wrong end of them.” / “Show me an honest man and I'll show you a damned fool,” the president of the Junior Steamfitters' League told the visiting president of the Epworth League. / “I don't believe in Democracy,” the clown from the National Association of Real Estate Boards reassured his fellow clowns. “I think it stinks.” / “I'll take all I can get,” the blind panhandler added, quietly yet distinctly, in the Madison Street halfway house."

"Yet the city keeps no creed, prefers no particular spire, advances no one color, tolerates all colors: the dark faces and the blue-eyed tribes, the sallow Slavs and the olive Italians. All the creeds that persecution harassed out of Europe find sanctuary on this ground, where no racial prejudice is permitted to stand up. / We insist that it go at a fast crawl, the long way around."

"Yet on nights when, under all the arc-lamps, the little men of the rain come running, you'll know at last that, long long ago, something went wrong between St. Columbanus and North Troy Street. And Chicago divided your heart. / Leaving you loving the joint for keeps. / Yet knowing it never can love you."

"These are the pavement-colored thousands of the great city's nighttime streets, a separate race with no place to go and the whole long night to kill."

"The city divided by the river is further divided by racial and lingual differences. [...] / So if you're entirely square yourself, bypass the forest of furnished rooms behind The Loop and stay on the Outer Drive till you swing through Lincoln Park. Then move, with the lake still on your square right hand, into those suburbs where the lawns are always wide, the sky is always smokeless, the trees are forever leafy, the churches are always tidy, gardens are always landscaped, streets are freshly swept, homes are pictures out of Town and Country. And the people are stuffed with kapok."

"It isn't hard to love a town for its greater and its lesser towers, its pleasant parks or its flashing ballet. Or for its broad and bending boulevards, where the continuous headlights follow, one dark driver after the next, one swift car after another, all night, all night and all night. But you never truly love it till you can love its alleys too. Where the bright and morning faces of old familiar friends now wear the anxious midnight eyes of strangers a long way from home."

"I used to hang open-mouthed around that sort of thing, coming away at last feeling nothing save some sort of city-wide sorrow. Like something had finally gone terribly wrong between the cross atop St. Columbanus and that wrought-iron gate, out of an old wrought-iron war, forever guarding the doubly-dead behind us. / [...] With the city spreading all about. Like some great diseased toadstool under a sheltering, widespread sky."

"It's every man for himself in this hired air. / Yet once you've come to be part of this particular patch, you'll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real."

"too knew that Chicago's blood was hustler's blood. Knowing that Chicago [...] forever keeps two faces, one for winners and one for losers; one for hustlers and one for squares. / [...] / For all the poolroom tigers in checkered caps who've never seen a cow, and all the night-club kittens who've never seen a cloud. / [...] For all our white-walled asylums and all our dark-walled courtrooms, overheated district stations and disinfected charity wards, where the sunlight is always soiled and there are no holiday hours. / For hospitals, brothels, prisons and such hells, where patronage comes up softly, like a flower."

"However do senators get so close to God? How is it that front-office men never conspire? That matinee idols feel such guilt? Or that winners never pitch in a bill toward the price of their victory?"

"Good times or hard, it's still an infidel's capital six days a week. / [...] Where only yesterday the evening crow crossed only lonely teepee fires, now the slender arc-lamps burn. / To reveal our backstreets to the indifferent stars."

"Yet the Do-Gooders still go doggedly forward, making the hustlers struggle for their gold week in and week out, year after year, once or twice a decade tossing an unholy fright into the boys. And since it's a ninth-inning town, the ball game never being over till the last man is out, it remains ' town as well as 's. The ball game isn't over yet. / But it's a rigged ball game."

"It's still an outlaw's capital – but of an outlawry whose colors, once crimson as the old Sauganash whiskey-dye, have been washed down, by many prairie rains, to the colorless grey of the self-made executive type playing the percentages from the inside. Under the pale fluorescent glow."

"For always our villains have hearts of gold and all our heroes are slightly tainted."

"Before you earn the right to rap any sort of joint, you have to love it a little while."

"Every day is under ."