A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren

A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren

With its depictions of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, Nelson Algren's A Walk in the Wild Side has found a place in the imaginations of all generations since it first appeared.

As Algren admitted, the book "wasn't written until long after it had been walked . . . I found my way to the streets on the other side of the Southern Pacific station, where the big jukes were singing something called 'Walking the Wild Side of Life.' I've stayed pretty much on that side of the curb ever since."

Perhaps the author's own words describe this classic work best: "The book asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives. Why men who have suffered at the hands of other men are the natural believers in humanity, while those whose part has been simply to acquire, to take all and give nothing, are the most contemptuous of mankind."

NELSON ALGREN (1909-1981), one of the most underappreciated and well-liked modern American authors, believed that literature is created whenever the legal apparatus is challenged by conscience in touch with humanity. Such belief is supported by his extensive amount of work. Algren's powerful voice sprang from the postwar urban wilderness of Chicago, and he returned again and again to that city of hustlers, junkies, and scamps, eventually bringing Chicago's deeper depths onto a stage for the entire world to see. Algren is one of our most stubborn and enduring novels, having won the inaugural National Book Award for fiction and being praised by Hemingway as one of America's two best authors. Five major novels, two collections of short fiction, a book-length poetry, and several collections of reportage are among his works. Algren died on May 9, 1981, just days after being named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was an inspiration to artists such as Kurt Vonnegut and Donald Barthelme, Studs Terkel and Lou Reed.