NEVER COME MORNING
Two generations of social evolution and technological progress have only exacerbated the cultural emptiness Wright described–the vast gulf between people’s physical and emotional needs and the junk they are forced to settle for, especially if they’re on the poor end of America’s ever more divided economic scale. Today, Never Come Morning (which was attacked when it came out as Nazi propaganda by the local Polish American establishment, whose complaints got the novel banned by the Chicago Public Library and made Algren the subject of an FBI investigation) seems at times almost quaint: a nearly obscenity-free depiction of an urban underclass not yet acquainted with the fast-paced thrills of crack, automatic assault weapons, and mass media that celebrate and enflame human beings’ most ruthless and selfish urges. But the book’s unflinching examination of what used to be called juvenile delinquency is timelier than ever. The final words of Al- gren’s death row-bound protagonist–“Knew I’d never get t’ be twenty-one anyhow”–seem an all-too-apt epitaph for a time when 11-year-old killer-victims dominate the news, representing the failure of both an individual family and a whole society.
