Nelson Algren, Stoic?

...Algren led a big life that included such diverse experiences as immersion, while a student at the University of Illinois, in the Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius; conviction for stealing a typewriter, which elicited the mercy of probation from a small-town Texas jury sympathetic to the argument that the defendant was like a carpenter who could not afford his tools; interaction with the Communist Party as a member of the “proletarian” school of American writers; F.B.I. surveillance personally authorized by J. Edgar Hoover; three marriages (two to the same woman); and a trans-Atlantic romance with Simone de Beauvoir. That affair, which began in 1947 when Beauvoir visited Chicago on a lecture tour and lasted about 12 years, seems to be one of the few things otherwise well-read people know about Algren today... (nyt, continues)

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