“The city today is more a soldier’s than an artist’s town,” Nelson Algren wrote 50 years ago in Chicago: City on the Make. Stuart McCarrell, who died last month, was both. Few have done more to keep Algren on the literary map, at least in Wicker Park, than McCarrell. He was a pal of Algren’s from 1967 to ’75, when the author fled Chicago to live briefly in New Jersey and then on Long Island, where he died in 1981. The editor of a literary magazine and an aspiring writer himself, McCarrell often accompanied Algren to White Sox games, to the Second City, to bars and restaurants.
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McCarrell knew Algren–author of The Man With the Golden Arm, Never Come Morning, The Neon Wilderness, and other novels and short stories that chronicled the dark underside of Division Street’s white-ethnic milieu–at a time when his star had faded and he felt neglected in his own city. Wanting “to further the recognition of Nelson Algren as a major American writer of the 20th century,” McCarrell and a group of Wicker Park residents formed the Nelson Algren Committee in 1989 and began staging annual multimedia fund-raising bashes on or around the writer’s March 28 birthday.
Almost as a sideline to his various literary ventures, McCarrell–who earned a bachelor’s degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology–owned and ran the Macan Engineering Company, which, since the mid-60s, has been located upstairs in the Lodge Hall building at 1564 N. Damen; the firm most recently manufactured dental surgical equipment. McCarrell’s second-floor office was where Algren often dropped by to visit him on his way to the Luxor Baths. It’s where, in an adjoining room, McCarrell headquartered Xenia Press and stored his Algren memorabilia. It’s where friends and colleagues could drop in on the polymath activist and discuss literature, history, and politics. And it’s where, on the morning of February 1, he was found at his desk, dead of a heart attack. McCarrell was 77–few knew he was that old.
–Jeff Huebner
