CONCLUSION:
NOTES FROM A CULTURAL SEA CHANGE

Budd Schulberg, novelist and Hollywood screenwriter, felt that the Watts riots of 1965 required a response of him. Schulberg, who had gained his greatest renown for his boxing novel The Harder They Fall (1947) and his screenplay of On the Waterfront, thought of himself as a 1930s- and 1940s-vintage realist. Like Nelson Algren, Schulberg credentialed his authorial persona to deliver social critique at street level with an urban insider's knowledge of the manly pastimes (boxing, horse racing, gambling) and inner lives of petty criminals, laborers, and workers in the industrial trades.^[1] "As an American writer, still oriented toward social fiction," Schulberg made it a point to uphold, as Algren did, "the old-fashioned notion that an author has a special obligation to his society, an obligation to understand it and to serve as its conscience." The use of "still" and "old-fashioned," like the white-ethnic neighborhood voices of New York and New Jersey in his books and movies ("I coulda been a contender," etc.), invoked resonances of the industrial city and the literatures of social criticism and decline that mapped it, including the work of Chicago realists like Algren. But in 1965 the postindustrial inner city, wracked by rioting, suddenly demanded the attention of a writer who claimed those antecedents and interests and who, like Warren Miller, prided himself on staying on the developing forward edge of the day's most compelling social issues. Schulberg therefore "felt an itch, an irresistible urge" to fashion a literary response to the Watts riots, which he understood to have blossomed into something far more cataclysmic than mere rioting: "a genuine, full scale Revolt, a rebellion that had been years in the making in the festering black ghettos of Los Angeles," a civil war between blacks and whites. This struggle was happening close enough to

Hollywood, Schulberg's particular "corner of the nation," that he, who was handsomely paid as one of Hollywood's in-house purveyors of "social fiction," felt obliged to do something about it.^[2]

Despite having the kind of insider knowledge of Watts expected of his generation of urban intellectual—"I had gone to Watts in my youth to hear T-Bone Walker and other local jazzmen in the honky-tonks"—Schulberg found himself unequipped to represent to his own satisfaction the ghettos of Los Angeles, which he regarded as part of his literary beat. "If I were to understand this urban tragedy, it would require not merely a look but a lot of looks, and not merely superficial looks but finally, somehow, from the inside looking out."^[3] Schulberg wholeheartedly accepted the racial logic of urban crisis: he felt impelled to produce representations of Watts that allowed him (and, therefore, his readers) to "understand" the ghetto from the inside, but he assumed the existence of invisible walls dividing the city of feeling that prevented him from executing such an imagined entry into ghetto life in his own, improperly authenticated "outsider's" hand and voice. Since he deemed himself unequipped as a writer to get "inside" enough to scratch the representational itch inspired in him by the principal social crisis of his time, he went to Watts to find those who could.

Schulberg founded the Watts Writers' Workshop in the aftermath of the riots. "Stories aren't fancy things," Schulberg told the workshop's first serious participant, nineteen-year-old Charles Johnson. "They're the things you've been doing, what you did in the uprising last month, what you're thinking about now."^[4] As a well-connected professional writer leading a workshop filled with novices, Schulberg would help to organize and polish the untrained language with which they turned the materials and events of ghetto life into literature. He would also provide a forum in which rough work could be aired, brought to the attention of experts, and eventually published.

Schulberg saw himself as a teacher; he therefore needed a textbook. He had read in the canon of ghetto narrative and its accepted antecedents, "from the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, to Dr. Clark's Dark Ghetto, the angry essays of Baldwin, and the abrasive Autobiography of Malcolm X" but he made Manchild in the Promised Land "our first textbook." That is, Schulberg aspired to make Manchild —its comprehensive survey of ghetto narrative and language, its spatial plot of the ghetto, its account of the development of Claude Brown as an urban intellectual—the template for the writing of a new cohort of urban intellectuals emerging from the damaged terrain of Watts with a body of new urban literature in hand. This new corpus of poetry, fiction, and autobiography would do the work of representing the inner city in crisis. Charles Johnson, at least, endorsed Schulberg's choice of Manchild. Brown spoke the right language and told the right stories: "'That's a real tough book. I didn't know you could put words like that in a book. Sounds just like we talk on a Hundred and Third Street. Everything he puts in that book, that's just like

what's going on here in Watts. I could tell a hundred stories just like it."' Schulberg felt obliged by the responsibilities of his cultural role to find and develop "a hundred stories just like it," a body of literature schematically outlined by Manchild.^[5]

Succession: New Orders and Old Orders

Schulberg's response to the Watts riots suggests some of the literary repercussions of the urban crisis. On the one hand, Schulberg concluded that his own training as an urban intellectual was in some ways still of great value in a moment of crisis. He could be a mentor to ghetto writers, linking them to a great tradition of writers of "social fiction" who fulfilled their "special obligation" to produce social critique. In his introduction to From the Ashes, a collection of writing by participants in the Watts Writers' Workshop, he includes among his honor roll of such literary antecedents several—Melville, Whitman, Norris, London, Sandburg, Sinclair, Dos Passos, the Chicago realist Richard Wright—who drew observantly upon industrial cities of fact, especially on the lives and milieux of the wage-earning classes and underclasses, in shaping American literary realism. On the other hand, Schulberg concluded that the particular set of qualities and credentials he presented as an urban intellectual was obsolescent, unfitted to the vitally important work of recognizing and figuring the postindustrial inner city in crisis. Other writers better suited to the task would have to take up his duties. These two conclusions and the tension between them drive Schulberg's account of how he participated in one local instance of Manchild's canonization. That account tells a quintessentially postwar narrative of succession, in this case within the community of urban intellectuals. As in the neighborhoods of American cities, the succession is made up of persistences as well as drastic change: the older order, incarnate in Schulberg, provides a substructure shaping the new; younger black writers, supplanting aging white ethnics, remake the literary landscape.

In passing from Nelson Algren to Claude Brown, I have offered a similar succession-not a simple matter of younger writers supplanting older ones or blacks replacing whites but rather a complex of overlapping persistences and changes that has layered new orders of urban intellectuals and new ways of writing on preexisting ones. The emergence of the postindustrial inner city was accompanied by the emergence of newly rearranged groups of urban intellectuals telling the stories and drawing the maps of postindustrial urbanism. Among the writers who command most of my attention in this study, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Gardner Smith, David Bradley, Diane McKinneyWhetstone, Warren Miller, and Claude Brown do the work of representing the second ghetto as it takes lasting shape. Nelson Algren and Jack Dunphy imagine the industrial white-ethnic neighborhood order in decline, while Mike

Royko, Stuart Dybek, and Pete Dexter trace the changing relation of the urban village's enclaved survivals to the postindustrial inner city. Finally, Smith, Bradley, McKinney-Whetstone, Royko, and a host of developers, political leaders, city planners, and their critics (Jane Jacobs, Denise Scott Brown) map the expanding preserves of the service-professional classes—office workers, managers, so-called urban pioneers, and all the rest who have since fallen under the loose rubric of "yuppies."

I have, then, described in case-study form a cultural and social sea change, the transformation of literary urbanism tied to the transformation of American cities in the decades after World War II. If that sea change and the successions and overlaps it entailed were extended, even diffuse, we can make out signs of them in a variety of texts, and not just in the novels and poems typically regarded as literary texts. The succession narrative and its historical contexts move beneath the surface of everyday artifacts: for example, Newsweek's issue of 16 August 1965 charts the sea change in three seemingly unrelated articles.

The issue of 16 August 1965 gives a sense of what the parallel transformations of the city of feeling and the city of fact might look like to a reader flipping through Newsweek while waiting in a dentist's office, eating a meal, or riding a bus in late summer 1965. The particular issue in question is in itself of no special historical significance, but one can read in this everyday text signs of significant social and cultural change over time, and one can make out a logic driving that change.

The issue's cover shows the forms of men, caught in searchlights, lined against a wall to be frisked by police, with the caption "CRIME in the streets." The cover story explains that, according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, "every category of crime was on the increase" and that since 1958 "serious crime has spiraled upward at a rate of five times that of the population."^[6] The story devotes a single paragraph to noting that the statistics are open to further interpretation and quotes some experts who feel the statistical rise greatly exaggerates the actual problem, but the thrust of the story overwhelms the caveat. The reader is obliged to conclude that there is much more crime than before in America, especially in urban America, and that this "crime wave" is part of a significant rise in urban violence and fear.

In sketching the causes of the rise in crime and popular anxiety over crime, the cover story makes a thumbnail sketch of postwar urban development. Concentrating upon "social, economic and psychic conditions under which crime seems to occur more often," Newsweek describes increasing "anonymity" and other strains on the social fabric attendant upon continuing urbanization, a large postwar cohort of young people violently at odds with the ways of life accepted by their parents, the intractability of poverty in an increasingly affluent society.^[7] These complex, bewildering lines of analysis, all of which skim the surface of the postindustrial transformation of urban economies and popula-

tions, lead the cover story's argument toward the organizing principle of race, which subsumes the others in sharply representable form.

Newsweek's cover story, then, hits upon one narrative line—the black migration from South to urban North—that organizes the others. At the heart of the problem of crime, the cover story finds, are poverty and the inner city, two terms that, like the word "urban" itself, threatened in the urban discourse of the mid-1960s to collapse into semi-synonyms of the word "Negro." Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach tells Newsweek, "the bigger the city, the harder it is to deter crime." In Katzenbach's and Newsweek's accounts, "the high rate of juvenile crime," the panic button of the 1950s, converges with "the high rate of Negro crime," the panic button of the 1960s, and these "two harsh facts" flow together as functions of Problem Number One, racial segregation. Newsweek concludes that "all too often, to speak of the slum today is to speak of the Negro" and quotes the blunt summation of this line of thinking by an anonymous "former high-ranking Administration official": "'to speak of crime today is to speak of Negro crime.'"^[8]

To speak of the violent, young, male Negro criminal was therefore to speak of postwar urban development in condensed form. He was the text in which the postwar period's most important urban stories could be read: to somehow figure out the criminal violence was to figure out the ghetto was to figure out the city-structuring effect of racial difference expressed as social cleavage. It follows that informants who could provide firsthand information on crime among youth in the ghetto were positioned to address issues at the top of the national agenda. Attorney General Katzenbach, like Senator Ribicoff's Senate subcommittee, turned to Claude Brown for testimony on the formation of young black male criminals. Katzenbach chaired the Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, appointed in 1965 by President Johnson to respond to the widespread worry over the increase in crime. Among the many sources of information on life in the black lower class cited by the commission's report, published in 1967, were the final lines of Manchild in the Promised Land's foreword: "For where does one run to when he is already in the promised land?"^[9]

Newsweek also looked to Brown, and directed its readers to look to Brown, for direct evidence of ghetto life and for imaginative literary exploitation of it. On page 81 of the 16 August issue, in the Books section, appears a respectful and enthusiastic review of Manchild, endorsing Brown in the role of exemplary child of the postwar inner city: "a man who was singled out by his voiceless generation—the 'plague generation,' he calls it—to be their tribune unto the nations, their witness and tongue, to tell how it was and what happened, and to count the appalling losses." The mock-biblical language here earnestly underscores, rather than ironizes, both the sense of crisis (often couched in language appropriate to a biblical plague) and Brown's role as spokesman for black Americans. If Brown's credentials as an ex-delinquent—"a battle scarred vet-

eran of a 'bebopping' gang" and the Harlem riot of 1943—position him to speak for an increasingly urbanized and Northern people, they also equip him with novel and efficacious resources of language: he speaks "the violent argot of the streets." The ex-delinquent Brown promises to be just the man to explain and make literature from the complex of pathologies identified and located in the second ghetto by the cover story, the "harsh facts" driving the wave of criminal violence and political disorder.^[10]

Newsweek's review of Manchild saw Claude Brown, a new-model urban intellectual, emerging out of the rubble of what many were calling urban decline and the failure of urban renewal. The picture of Brown accompanying Newsweek's review literalizes that cultural role (fig. II). Brown, looking young and powerful in a blocky suit, tieless, stands hand on hip (producing the effect to which Walt Whitman seems to aspire in the portrait in Leaves of Grass ) against a backdrop of inner-city textures: weathered brick walls, rubble, garbage. The caption reads "Brown: 'The plague generation."' A similar photograph accompanied an enthusiastic page I review in the New York Times Book Review, an almost identical shot in what appears to be the same location, with two children framed in the window to Brown's right—suggesting that Brown speaks as well for the next generation being formed in the crucible of the second ghetto. The reader sees in Newsweek and the Times a literal mapping of authorial persona on the urban landscape. Brown emerges from this postwar landscape to map it in prose, to write the key terrain of urban crisis from the inside out, to play the role Budd Schulberg's succession narrative cast him in.

The 16 August issue of Newsweek offers a version of that succession narrative, suggesting the writers of the postindustrial ghetto as literary successors to the writers of the urban village by juxtaposing Brown's arrival on the urban scene with Nelson Algren's departure from it. Page 81 also features a review of Nelson Algren's latest book, a mélange of journalism and criticism entitled Notesfrom a Sea Diary: HemingwayAll the Way. The review runs onto page 82, where a shirt-sleeved Nelson Algren, in his fifties and looking weathered, smiles or grimaces in some unidentifiable sunny locale above the caption, "Algren: 'O chasmed love"' (fig. 12). As Brown appears to claim a place at center stage in representing the inner city, Algren sails off on a sea journey, entirely leaving the American urban literary scene that he had seemed poised to dominate at midcentury. The juxtaposition of Brown's arrival and Algren's departure is probably unintentional, but the logic of urban crisis gives it a powerful charge.

Persistence: Departure and Return

Sea Diary is a retrospective and disappointed book: a diminished writer's account of retreat from his literary turf resonates with his embittered defense of

the legacy of a dead contemporary (Hemingway) against hyenalike critics come to pick at the corpse. Algren had by the 1960s departed from the model of the practicing urban intellectual invoked by Schulberg. Algren had stopped writing novels and what Schulberg called "social fiction," his original stock in trade, and now cast himself in Sea Diary as "a free-lance journalist out of Chicago" who reviewed other people's city books, covered the offbeat and lowlife, and wrote travel pieces.^[11] The "out of Chicago" (my italics) is telling. Although still based in Chicago, Algren considered himself to be alienated from his old beat, and Sea Diary explores the theme of exile both as travel and as a conflict between Algren and the literary standard-makers of the day, who had turned on Hemingway as well as Algren. "What was I doing in Asia?" he asks himself upon awakening in a prostitute's bed in Pusan. "This time I could find no other reason than that I didn't want to be at home" (55-56). Newsweek's reviewer therefore values Algren as "Chicago's own flying Dutchman," a rootless, tale-spinning old curmudgeon: a producer not of contemporary "social fiction" but of a pleasingly nostalgic, curious body of light "Algreniana"; "an old hand" whose oeuvre always finds its way down well-grooved paths to the fixed poker games and whores-with-hearts-of-gold he first made it his business to write in the 1930s.^[12]

By 1965, Algren imagined as complete the story of the industrial city's decline, and the concomitant decline of the Chicago realists who were that city's leading students, in which he saw himself caught up at midcentury. Developing the implications of the great urban crisis of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century built around industrialization, urbanization, and immigration, Algren and his literary ancestors had created an influential, integrated set of representations, models, and critiques of the prewar city. By midcentury, narratives of decline detailing the breakup of this industrial city's orders, including the representational, could be found throughout American culture and, of course, in literary culture. After Golden Arm, Algren gradually removed his authorial persona from the terrain of the contemporary inner city. By the 1960s, he was imagining the final foreclosure of the landscape onto which he mapped his writing persona: "the day that the double-tiered causeway is merged with the expressway that merges with the coast-to-coast thruway making right-hand turns every mile into a hundred solid miles of mile-high skyscrapers."^[13] Algren, who was in 1949 still the next big thing in urban literature, was shuffled off the urban stage as it changed around him into the signature landscape of postindustrial urbanism.

Sixteen years after Golden Arm, Sea Diary removes itself from the urban scene and from the present. In it Algren makes a tour of Asian ports and considers his past, inventories the prostitutes of the Orient, dabbles in poetry (the "O chasmed love" part), and defends Ernest Hemingway against critics like Dwight Macdonald, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman Podhoretz. Algren dismisses

these effete characters as "mere nose drops in the nostrils of literature" (245) and mounts a comprehensively revisionist defense of Hemingway as a social realist and literary "dissenter" against their accounts of his technical and psychological "failures." If Algren does seem genuinely motivated by these critics' shabby treatment of a literary hero, there is as well a second source of his animus against them. His defense of Hemingway (who enthusiastically admired Algren's writing) serves as an excuse to attack an influential group of critics who also played active roles in the decline of Algren's literary reputation and in pronouncing his brand of "social fiction," Chicago realism, passé. When Algren defends Hemingway from Dwight Macdonald's parodic assaults—Hemingway never learned new tricks, "and nothing is worse than a trick that has gone stale," or "his legs began to go and his syntax became boring. . . . But the bartenders still liked him" (89)—Algren is also counterattacking against critics like Macdonald who have been saying the same about him.

In recasting Hemingway as an (improbable) ally of the Chicago realists, as a literary reporter or social realist wronged by critics, Sea Diary mounts as well a defense of Algren's notion of literature. Algren contends sweepingly throughout Sea Diary that critical and literary life has declined in the postwar era in growing apart from the fundamental purposes of literature as defined by people like Algren (and Schulberg), which is to observe social reality and to make poetry out of questioning its orders and the meanings they make available.

Enacting this vision of literary work, Algren's journey to the ports of the East leads him to a familiar set of social materials—crooked card games, petty criminal schemes, legions of prostitutes—that figure the entrapment of desperate marginal characters in the workings of vast urban machines organized and powered by the imperatives of commerce. He plots this familiar world in familiar ways. Constricted streetscapes like the "fogbound warren" of Pusan's red-light district or Bombay's Street of the Hundred Cages, in which prostitutes ply their trade, recall the narrow vistas of Chicago's urban villages. In shabby dwellings like Calcutta's Kanani Mansions, an "ominous tenement" akin to Jailer Schwabatski's rooming house in Golden Arm, hustlers and loiterers forming cross-sections of the underlife are always figuratively in the street. Algren finds the same building blocks of literature in the Far East that he found on the Near Northwest Side of Chicago. Faced with the criminality and indigence of Bombay, he concludes, "I couldn't be sure that I wasn't still in Chicago" (120).

But Sea Diary is not a novel of the city disguised as an essay; its deepest impulses are secondary and critical. When Sea Diary returns in flashback to the familiar landscape of Chicago's neighborhood order, pushing the identity between the port cities of the Orient and the Chicago Algren wrote in the past, it reveals the central purpose of the narrative's grand movement through space: not to imagine a way of life but to launch a wholesale attack on the intellectual

and critical consensus that has excluded Algren. The prelude to Algren's discussion of Hemingway is an anecdote about the decline and fall of an amateur tightrope walker, an immigrant "greenhorn" who lived next door to Algren during a "lost summer" in Algren's childhood. That story traverses the low-rise landscape and downward-tilted narrative line of Golden Arm and City on the Make: a constricted autumnal vista bounded by wires and fire escapes where "washing was whipping whitely" (a central image in City on the Make); a "Room without Corers" (like the one in Golden Arm where Sophie goes irretrievably mad) where police bring the tightrope walker in order to break his nonconformist will; a "neighborhood factory that manufactured endless belting for other factories" (like the Endless Belt and Leather works in Golden Arm) where the fallen dissenter is refitted as a cog in the city machine; old-style taverns (like Antek's in Golden Arm) where he sinks into the grotesque half-life of the terminal drunk (97-101). The story of the tightrope walker serves as prologue to a story of great writers, among them Hemingway, dragged down and disciplined by the machine of criticism, which Algren understands to be implacably alienated from the lives of his subjects, the "people who don't read" (105). In Algren's telling, this intellectual decline explains how the critics could have turned on him and celebrated instead a writer like Saul Bellow, a putative Chcago writer with a very different authorial self-conception: "How else to explain that a compilation of literary allusions such as Herzog, possessing no value beyond cuteness, can be mistaken for a living book?" (103-4). The tightrope walker, unsurprisingly, is supposed to be Algren too, dragged down and disciplined by a critical consensus that has devalued Chicago realism on the prewar model.

Sea Diary, then, wants to explain Algren's yoked departures from the American city of feeling and from the first rank of postwar writers as the result of a critical conspiracy. Newsweek's review accepts and is amused by this story, but at the same time the reviews of Algren and Brown together posit a different context for that departure: a narrative of succession in which some of the primary work of observing and questioning contemporary urbanism now fell to writers, like Claude Brown, who engaged with the postindustrial city. The most important representational materials for that work were to be found in the second ghetto landscape of "black America," positioned at the center of a metropolis from which Algren, an elder statesman among industrial urbanism's literary figures, was for reasons of his own in a kind of exile or diasporic flight. The irony of Algren's flight, readable in Sea Diary, was that it led him to familiar materials that were resonant with Brown's—poverty, criminality, entrapment, all inflected by questions of race (arising in the interaction of white Americans with indigent Asians).

The exile, as exiles will, returned. When the urban crisis was over, and the

postindustrial city of feeling had achieved a measure of generic stability, Algren came back to his subject. Algren's eventual return in the 1970s to the literary work of the urban intellectual, as he originally conceived of that work, fittingly entailed a turn to the materials of ghetto narrative. Algren nursed his grudge against the literary and critical worlds for the rest of his years, and he finally left Chicago for good in 1975, moving to Paterson, New Jersey, and eventually to a writers' preserve at Sag Harbor on Long Island, but before his death in 1981 he made a return to the social realist novel, the genre he had abandoned in the 1950s. Algren's last novel, The Devil's Stocking (published posthumously in 1983),^[14] fictionalizes the story of black middleweight boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, imprisoned for a triple murder that some people believed he did not commit. Among Carter's supporters were some famous people, like Muhammad Ali and Bob Dylan, who made him a minor cause célèbre. Algren, drawn to the sense of constriction and thwarted aspiration in Carter's story, effected his return as novelist to the inner city by telling that story, by moving through "black America" and through a set of narrative patterns definitively surveyed by Manchild.

Algren had not written a novel since A Walk on the Wild Side (1955), a comprehensive rewrite of his earlier novel Somebody in Boots (1935), and he had abandoned his last serious attempt at a new one—the Chicago drug novel Entrapment— in the 1950s. Devil's Stocking started out as reportage, but Algren came to believe that the story of Hurricane Carter's encounter with the legal, economic, and racial machinery of urban order had the makings of a novel. The materials of the story circulated ready to hand in the form of Carter's autobiography, The Sixteenth Round, which Algren reviewed for the Los Angeles Times in 1974.^[15] In the review, Algren has almost nothing to say about Carter's writing, or about the book itself at all, but he outlines the narrative as a set of raw materials: a promising black boxer with a long criminal history convicted of killing three whites in a bar, inconsistencies and signs of a possible frame-up in the government's case against him, a context of heightened racial tension (the murders took place in 1966, the first trial in 1967) that gave the events greater significance. Carter offered ready-made a story of"entrapment" that spoke to the organizing urban issues of the day.

Carter's Sixteenth Round touches upon some of Algren's favorite themes and subjects—Algren had written about boxers and barroom murders before^[16] —but it also develops narrative lines sketched out in Manchild's survey of firstperson ghetto narrative. Claude Brown accordingly identified Sixteenth Round, in a blurb appearing on the back cover of the paperback edition just above a blurb extracted from Algren's review, as the "most powerful book I've read to date—eloquently written and extremely revealing." There was much in Sixteenth Round to remind a reader of Manchild: profanely colorful and

authenticatingly stiff by turns, Carter's jailhouse memoir offers the story of a "manchild" (born, like Brown, in 1937) who "has heart" and is "good with his hands," becomes "war counselor" of a delinquent gang, gets into trouble with the law, and finally finds his calling as a fighter and writer.

Hurricane Carter thus pursues the specific career path taken by Brown's friend Turk, but at the same time he follows Brown's career path in detailing his own formation as an intellectual. In the army, he learns the discipline of boxing and finds a mentor who encourages him not only toward a Muslim conversion (one of the third acts that Brown considers and rejects) but also toward conquering his stutter and developing himself in Brown's métier, the discipline of facility with language that parallels the fighter's facility with his hands: "As I began learning how to talk with some clarity, all the knowledge that I had picked up in the course of my life . . . began to pour from my mouth like the unbridled Niagara . . . . I developed a special feeling for verbal expression . . . My whole life changed. My attitude, even my boxing ability, greatly improved."^[17] These parallel developments continue as Carter leaves the army and rises to the rank of leading contender for the middleweight title, but Carter finds himself imprisoned for a number of minor offenses and finally for life after being convicted of the triple murder. Sixteenth Round ends with Carter in prison and working on his latest appeal, the boxer as urban intellectual equipped by street life and his time in prison to analyze, fight against, and write about a social order that he sees as bent on the destruction of young black men.

Algren's Devil's Stocking found the same materials in Carter's story and in Paterson and New York that Algren had earlier found in Chicago's neighborhoods and in Pusan, Bombay, and Calcutta. Devil's Stocking entraps its characters in a narrow landscape: the male lead, Ruby Calhoun, a revitalized version of Frankie Machine, finds himself penned in by crooked police and the politics of race; his mistress Dovie-Jean, the female lead and a similar gloss on Molly Novotny, ends up marooned in a Times Square whorehouse. Ruby, the fictionalized Rubin Carter, is a naturalist brute rather than a formative urban intellectual. Loutish and vigorous, he moves almost blindly through an annihilating inner city and the prisons that express in purest form its constricting logic. Devil's Stocking, detailing the destruction of a regular guy rather than the formation of an urban intellectual, is in that sense closer to Golden Arm than to Sixteenth Round or Manchild. Returning to the novel form after a long hiatus, during which other writers developed generic formulae for representing the postindustrial city, Algren produced a novel that reads like a New Journalist's rewrite of Native Son (complete with extended trial scenes). He slots black inner-city types into the well-worn positions occupied by his old Polish subjects, positions nakedly exposed to the structuring forces of urban order. This generic compromise makes sense: Algren's standing interest in the theme of

entrapment fit closely with canonical understandings of the second ghetto that had been formulated in the 1960s and developed into a large and various literature. In the end, the urban intellectual who emerges in Devil's Stocking is Algren, not Ruby Calhoun: Ruby's life might have been an exercise in constriction and futility, but the old urbanist was back to work.

Plenty of Algren's faithful readers regard Devil's Stocking as an embarrassing last spasm, but there were critical voices to endorse his return to the novel of the city. For instance, John Aldridge, writing in the New York Times Book Review in 1983, uses Devil's Stocking to elevate Algren above fellow Chicago realist James T. Farrell.^[18] Both Algren and Farrell were recently deceased in 1983, and both had last novels in the bookstores. "[N]either gained significantly in reputation after the success of his early work," but Aldridge argued that Algren had adjusted his talents to the changing times with more success than Farrell, whose final novel, Sam Holman, is "a product of played-out energies, decrepit ideas and an evidently compulsive desire to perform the act of writing long after there existed anything authentic to be said." This sounds like a critical requiem for a "played-out," "decrepit" city of feeling built by Chicago neighborhood novelists in the 1930s and 1940s, in which Farrell apparently entombed himself and which Algren finally managed to depart, confirming "one's impression that Algren remained to the end the better writer" with "far richer verbal gifts . . . a much more vital relation with his materials . . . a larger and freer range of imaginative inventiveness." Aldridge reads Devil's Stocking, Algren's move into the narratives associated with "black America," as giving Algren's literary persona greater scope and continuing life. It makes Algren's imagination "more vital," "larger and freer." Algren becomes the more significant writer because his imagined city manifested both a richer historical life (from prewar slum to postwar ghetto) and a richer architecture of language than did Farrell's.

As Budd Schulberg did so swiftly in founding the Watts Writers' Workshop, the much less flexible and enterprising Algren eventually found a way to do what he had always done that also allowed for engagement with "black America," which became the urban subject in the mid-1960s and has enjoyed that status ever since. Algren, then, finally evolved a way to move in his original manner—via the novel—through the postindustrial city of feeling from which he had understood himself to be excluded in the 1960s. Like the Eastern European neighborhoods of the Milwaukee Avenue corridor, persistent relics of the industrial city that sustain the old ways even as they recede under newer urban orders and change through their interaction with those orders, Algren's writing entered the zone of overlap in which older and newer orders of urban literature engage with one another. Devil's Stocking descends on the one hand from  Golden Arm and the Chicago realist tradition but on the other from

Sixteenth Round and the literature of the ghetto that developed Manchild's generic outline.

In turn, Manchild, and the literature of urban crisis it surveys and anticipates, owes a debt to the Chicago neighborhood novelists, whose representational project it extends into the terrain of the postindustrial inner city. Claude Brown identifies Algren's old friend and fellow Chicago realist Richard Wright as his "literary idol," and Brown encapsulates Wright's influence on him in a story of Manchild's genesis. Brown says that for six months after signing a contract with Macmillan he could not write a word but that he finally broke through the initial block and began to draft Manchild after happening across a copy of Wright's Eight Men in a Trailways bus station in Washington, D.C.:

Wright was my literary idol, and I couldn't understand how I had missed that one [book by him]. I wanted to write like him, with the emotional impact, the force, the captivating impact. It's like, if I play a trumpet and I admire so and so; I don't want to play just like him, but I want my playing to have that same effect. . . . So, anyway, I couldn't understand how I had missed that one. I read it that night, and at 4:00 in the morning I put a clean sheet of paper in the typewriter and started writing Manchild.^[19]

In Brown's story of literary succession, as in Stuart Dybek's nod to the possibilities for urban literature suggested by Algren, a Chicago realist provides a model for writers of the inner city to follow. Brown's work starts where Wright's work stops, the two oeuvres flowing together into one continuous effort to write the city. And if Brown's Harlem was part of an emergent urban world that Algren regarded as new and strange in the 1960s, Algren would probably find much that was familiar in the portrait of Harlem in decline that Brown has drawn in latter years.^[20]

Algren, Brown, and the other writers of Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York I have discussed form an overlapping complex of persistences and successions. They wrote and rewrote the city of feeling as the postindustrial city of fact took new and compelling shape around them. When Algren described Chicago as "an October sort of city even in spring," he described the process of layering we can trace in the material cities the writers observed and the textual cities they created. When one set of urban orders declines, entering its autumnal or "October" phase, signs of the next round of urban orders begin to appear; one can see signs of the coming "spring." As these new orders mature into a new layer of urban development, survivals of the October city can be seen among the roots and in the interstices of the new, dominant orders. And, if one

knows what to look for or enjoys the benefit of hindsight, one can see signs of an inevitable autumn to come, of a future decline, in even the most vigorous, expansive, permanent-seeming urban orders when they are in their springtime vigor. Despite Algren's choice of a natural metaphor, this figurative round of seasons is not an "ecological" process. Rather, the redevelopment of material and textual cities is the result of choices made by individuals, groups, and institutions: how to invest money and effort, what to build and what to publish, how to live and what to write, social policy and word choice. There is a literature of city life, and a history of it, in the shifting overlap of urban orders shaped by those choices.