In the never-before-published, book-length essay Nonconformity...[Algren] articulates an American literary world view that should guide the generations of writers to follow him-a quest so ambitious it is hard to think of any other American writer who attempted it since, perhaps, Ralph Waldo Emerson in Self-Reliance."-Gerald Nicosia, in The Washington Post Book World and The Chicago Sun-Times.

"A handbook for tough, truth-telling outsiders who are proud, as was Algren, to damn well stay that way."-Kurt Vonnegut (May 1996)

"A PASSIONATE DEFENSE OF THE WRITER.... Angry and funny as Algren usually is."-Kirkus Reviews

"At 16 bucks and beautifully bound-it may be among the best coffee table books of the year-Nonconformity is a steal, a few strokes of wonderful writing combined with an excellent bit of literary archaeology."-Bart Schneider in Salon

"This extended essay on what it takes to be a writer-and by extension a man-provides a corrosive antidote to any fin de siecle sentimentalizing of the American midcentury as a...golden age."-The Boston Globe

"Nonconformity underscores the beliefs of Algren, Dreiser and an army of intellectuals that it is the duty of the serious writer to serve as society's moral conscience.... Simon has done a great service in bringing this book into print."-Bettina Drew in The Chicago Tribune

"Wise, courageous and humane."-Publishers Weekly

The struggle to write with deep emotion is the subject of this extraordinary book, the previously unpublished credo of one of America's greatest 20th-century writers.

"You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich," writes Nelson Algren in his only longer work of nonfiction, adding: "A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery."

Nonconformity is about 20th-century America: "Never on the earth of man has he lived so tidily as here amidst such psychological disorder."; And it is about the trouble writers ask for when they try to describe America: "Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards...[where there] are still... defeats in which everything is lost [and] victories that fall close enough to the heart to afford living hope."

In Nonconformity, Algren identifies the essential nature of the writer's relation to society, drawing examples from Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Twain, and Fitzgerald, as well as utility infielder Leo Durocher and legendary barkeep Martin Dooley. He shares his deepest beliefs about the state of literature and its role in society, along the way painting a chilling portrait of the early 1950s, Joe McCarthy's heyday, when many American writers were blacklisted and ruined for saying similar things to what Algren is saying here.

As Algren was writing Nonconformity, his affair with Simone de Beauvoir was coming toan end and the FBI was compiling an extensive file on him. Both of these developments exerted an influence on the resulting essay. Finally, the FBI found two informants of "known reliability" to denounce him as a former Communist. Doubleday, his New York publisher, which had pressed Algren to let them publish Nonconformity, then cancelled his contract.