Never Come Morning

An unusual book and a brilliant book - The New York TimesOne of the finest works of American literature that I have read - James T. FarrellA knockout - Saturday Review of LiteratureNever Come Morning depicts the intensity of feeling, the tawdry but potent dreams, the crude but forceful poetry, and the frustrated longing for human dignity residing in the lives of the Poles of Chicago's Northwest Side, and this revelation informs us all that there lies an ocean of life at our doorstep - an unharnessed, unchanneled and unknown ocean... - Richard WrightUtter sincerity and psychological truth - Philip Rahv in The NationMr. Algren is out to shock, but he does so without seeming to sensationalize. I, for one, found myself believing - Clinton Fadiman in The New YorkerThe girls sitting around the juke-box in Mama Tomek's, the boys playing under the El, the look of Chicago streets in the rain... It is the poetry of familiar things that is missing in the other Chicago novels... Algren is a poet the Chicago slums. - Malcolm CowleyA book, a true book, is the writer's confessional. For, whether he would have it so or not, he is betrayed, directly or indirectly, by his characters, into presenting, publicly, his innermost feelings. - Nelson AlgrenCover photograph: Stephen Deutch