SOURCE: "They're Human Too," in Washington Post Book Week, Vol. 1, December 8, 1963, p. 20.

In the following excerpt from a review of the anthology Nelson Algren's Own Book of Lonesome Monsters, Frankel discusses Algren's introduction to the work and the one story he contributed, "The House of the Hundred Grassfires."

Algren on Learning to Write:

Nobody yet ever learned to write at a writers' conference. For these are social occasions; while writing, always and everywhere, is as secret and antisocial as safecracking. All you can possibly learn here is what other men's lights are.

You have to have your own lights to go by, and your own fences for leaping. And these you find only off by yourself. Off on your own where you learn to set your own pace, take your own chances, and your own sweet time as well.

For in the end it is only in the...