A Walk on the Wild Side A Novel

With its depictions of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans,A Walk in the Wild Sidehas 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, now considered one of America's finest novelists, was born in Detroit in 1909, and lived most of his life in Chicago. His jobs included migrant worker, journalist, and medical worker. He is the author of five novels, including The Man with the Golden Arm, which was the winner of the first National Book Award. Algren died in 1981.

"The intensity of his feeling, the accuracy of his thought, make me wonder if any other writer of our time has shown us more exactly the human basis of our democracy. Though Algren often defines his positive values by showing us what happens in their absence, his hell burns with passion for heaven."—The New York Times Book Review

"A Walk on the Wild Side . . . deserves to read by every Catch-22 and Cuckoo's Nest freak just so they can find out what opened the door for [these] two novels . . . It's not only that before Heller and Kesey there was Algren. It's that Algren is where they came from."—Rolling Stone

"Mr. Algren, boy, you are good."—Ernest Hemingway