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sister Irene’s address on Creston Avenue in the Bronx and left the office feeling satisfied with the shrewd way he’d conducted himself in the world of business. Later he joked that this must be a record low in the world of literary advances. Back on the street, Nelson broke the ten at Hubert’s, a wax museum that had an exhibit of the Cubs great Grover Cleveland Alexander,whose career in Chicago was ended by alcohol and who, like Swede Risberg, frequently turns up in Nelson’s later writing as a symbol of old city glory. Algren also took advantage of his time in New York to meet two “Rebel Poets”—Herman Spector and Sol Funaroff, who had just been published by Conroy in a collection called
We Gather Strength
. He was a writer now, among other writers, talking about the country’s problems. A letter confirming his agreement with Vanguard showed Nelson was still playing with his name—the Bronx forwarding address had him as “Nelson Algren Abraham” while the signature line was “Nelson Abraham Algren.”
    Nelson knew he needed to go back to Texas for his book—memory was never good enough. He had to be in the place he was writing about. The writers he admired—Charles Dickens and Stephen Crane and Anton Chekhov—paid close attention to detail. Algren read Crane so often—particularly
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
and “The Blue Hotel”—that he felt like he had written his works himself. Of Chekhov, Algren once said, “The son of a bitch really puts you in a room.” Nelson wanted his readers in the room, even if they did not want to be there,
especially
if they did not want to be there. For Algren it was not enough to say a character had landed in a jail cell—it had to be a particular cell, the one with the metal benches on one wall, a heavy metal spoon held in a bracket, and a smelly bucket in the corner. “You had to know the difference between the cells in two different jails,” he said.
    Besides his writing friends, Nelson had nothing to keep him at home—his sister Bernice had her hands full with her family. Nelson’s romance with a sculptress named Barbara Bein had gone sour, and she was berating him to friends. Nelson also did not feel he could use his little bit of money to help his struggling parents, who had been supporting him. The main attraction in Chicago was lovely Sally Rand and her feathered fan at the World’s Fair, which was trying to cheer up unemployed midwesterners with thenotion that this was really a Century of Progress. Nelson was both fascinated and revolted by the spectacle—with its Midget City, Sky Ride, and rainbow-colored, futuristic buildings for twenty-five cents a ticket, just blocks away from ragged children digging in ash cans. But he wanted to be alone, in the place he was writing about. He did not want to take orders from anybody, and he needed a touch of cold-bloodedness to do what he had to do.
    The South delivered on its promise of research almost immediately—he was pulled out of a boxcar by police in Greenville, North Carolina. The white prisoners were sent to the Salvation Army and warned that if they were caught on the train again, they’d get arrested. The black prisoners were sent off to hard labor. Heading west again, he passed through Alabama and Louisiana, then back to El Paso, copying observations about the types of train cars into his notebook and trying out phrases: “the Mississippi was an oily brown” or “the moonlight lay slantwise over the baggage carts.” He took down snatches of dialogue and slang—a Mexican was a “pepper,” “beef” was meat. Nelson had rejected “The Gods Gather” as the name of the novel and settled on “Native Son,” from the old song:
    The miners came in ’49,
    The whores in ’51,
    They jungled up in Texas
    And begot the Native Son.
    He walked across the