- His affair with French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir was dramatized in the John Susman play "Nelson & Simone" that premiered in Fall, 2000, at Chicago's Live Bait Theatre with Gary Houston as Algren and Rebecca Covey as Beauvoir. With Fred Wellisch as Jean-Paul Sartre. Director: Richard Cotovsky.
- His 1949 novel, The Man with the Golden Arm, won the first National Book Award. The awards were presented on March 16, 1950 at a dinner at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City. Algren was presented his award by Eleanor Roosevelt. The awards dinner was broadcast on radio station WQXR. He hated Otto Preminger's movie version of the novel as he felt he was financially cheated by Preminger and the ending of the book was completely changed for a Hollywood happy ending.
- Although Algren, due to his surname, was thought of by most casual observers in the more tribal times of the 20th Century as a Scandinavian-American, he was primarily Jewish. His paternal grandfather, who was of Swedish stock, converted to Judaism as an adult and married a Jewess. His father, brought up as a Jew, married within the faith. Algren's mother was Jewish, and under Judaism, one is a Jew only if one's mother is of the faith. On his part, Algren was not religious and really did not identify with any religious or ethnic group. His creed could best be described as compassion for the poor and downtrodden.
- Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors". New Revision Series, volume 61, pg. 2-10. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1998.
- Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". Volume One, 1981-1985, pages 13-15. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1998.
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