His second novel, "Never Come Morning" (1942), was described by Andrew O'Hagan in 2019 as "the book that really shows the Algren style in its first great flourishing." It portrays the dead-end life of a doomed young Polish-American boxer turned criminal. Ernest Hemingway, in a July 8, 1942, letter to his publisher Maxwell Perkins, said of the novel: "I think it very, very good. It is as fine and good stuff to come out of Chicago." The novel offended members of Chicago's large Polish-American community, some of whose members denounced it as pro-Axis propaganda. Not knowing that Algren was of partly Jewish descent, some incensed Polish-American Chicagoans said he was pro-Nazi Nordic. His Polish-American critics persuaded Mayor Edward Joseph Kelly to ban the novel from the Chicago Public Library.