SOURCE: An introduction to The Neon Wilderness, Writers and Readers Publishing, Inc., 1986, pp. 7-11.

In the following introduction to the 1986 edition of The Neon Wilderness, Carson calls the collection "the pivotal book of Nelson Algren's career" and comments on Algren's writing style and the relationship between his short stories and his novels.

The Neon Wilderness, first published in 1947, is the pivotal book of Nelson Algren's career—the one which bid a subdued but determined farewell to everything that had earlier made him no more than just another good writer, and inaugurated the idiosyncratic, bedevilled, cantankerously poetic sensibility that would see him ranked among the few literary originals of his time. With The Neon Wilderness, Algren turned into one of the few American writers, increasingly uncommon since Dreiser, in whom compassion for the dispossessed does not involve a sort of mental portage to reach them. The great revelation for...