Christine Metropolis Rowland was born in 1912 as the eldest of seven children. She met Nelson Algren at college in the 1930’s. Christine married Neal Rowland at Crown Point, Indiana. Nelson Algren wrote to both Christine and Neal throughout the 1940s and early 1950s.

Nelson Algren (originally Nelson Ahlgren Abraham) was born in 1909 in Detroit, MI. His family moved to Chicago when he was three years old. He grew up in the city and went on to study journalism at the University of Illinois. There, he met Christine Rowland (then Christine Metropolis), who became a long-term friend and confidante.

He published his first story, “So Help Me,” in 1933 to enthusiastic critical reception. This first two novels, Somebody in Boots (1935) and Never Come Morning (1942), soon followed. His literary career was interrupted by World War II, during which Algren served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. Shortly after the war ended, Algren met the French feminist author Simone de Beauvoir. They began a long-distance affair that spanned 17 years.

Upon his return to Chicago, Algren rose to the height of his popularity with The Neon Wilderness (1947), which was honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and The Man with the Golden Arm (1949). The latter received the inaugural National Book Award for fiction. He followed these successes with A Walk on the Wild Side (1956), and in 1951 he published the long prose poem Chicago, City on the Make.

Limited by anti-communist sentiment and literary censorship, Algren turned away from novel writing in the mid-1950s. While he continued composing short stories and works of nonfiction, his writing career dipped into relative obscurity. Some of his later writings include a collection of travel essays titled Who Lost an American? (1963) and Notes from a Sea Diary: Hemingway All the Way (1965).

In 1974, Algren moved to the East Coast, spending time in Paterson, NJ before settling in Sag Harbor on Long Island. Before his death, his writings garnered a second wave of attention, and he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1981. He died of a heart attack three months later. The Devil’s Stocking, Algren’s final novel, was published posthumously in 1983.