Mary Wisniewski on Nelson Algren

        If you take the Chicago Tribune, you may know Mary Wisniewski as its transportation reporter and Getting Around columnist. Instead of giving us the latest infrastructure updates though, she will be transporting us to a different time in Chicago, as she puts on her other hat as an award-winning biographer of Nelson Algren.

        Perhaps you won’t believe it, but Chicago used to be a city on the make, with hustlers, crooked politicians, and a seamy underbelly that you didn’t have to look too hard to find. Wisniewski will take us there as she swings open the door to two-fisted writing that wasn’t set on the Gold Coast, with all the punches that connected and the ones that missed by a mile. There is more to Algren than his affair with Simone de Beauvoir, and as the New York Times said of Wisniewski in its review of her book — Algren - A Life — “… ah, she gets it.”