Novelist Nelson Algren and singer Billie Holiday are two iconic figures of mid-20th-century American culture, though Holiday's name and visage--not to mention her voice--is surely better-known and remembered than Algren's is today. (At least Starbucks hasn't taken to hawking copies of The Man With the Golden Arm at the coffee counter yet.) Algren, perhaps, made the mistake of living too long and fading into relative obscurity before his death in 1981.
