SUSAN JACOBY is an independent scholar and the author of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004), which was listed as a notable book by The New York Times and The Washington Post, and New York Times bestseller The Age of American Unreason (2008). Her reviews, articles and essays have appeared in a wide variety of national publications, including The New York Times, The American Prospect, Dissent, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and The Washington Post Book Review, among others. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
"It's about time! When we've got a living American writer as surefooted and as fast off the mark as Nelson Algren, it's almost criminal not to have something of his hard in covers at least once a year, to heft and roar at and revel in . . . What we have here in this big fat volume is a cockeyed chrestomathy of 37 Algren pieces . . . with his hallmark stamped on every link." -New York Times Book Review
"Essential Algren." -Washington Post
"Very good, fast, funny and tough . . . Algren, where have you been hiding." -San Francisco Chronicle