Publisher Description

With its depictions of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, A Walk on the Wild Side found a place in the imaginations of all the generations that have followed since. Perhaps his own words describe the book 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.

Author Biography

gren /f Nelson

Kirkus US Review

The Man With The Golden Arm (1949- and currently making its appearance in moving pictures) proved Algren's pitying, pinpoint view of a lower depths of society; this encompasses Storyville - the "wild side" of New Orleans- and the wild boys who drift to it. Fitz Linkhorn was a wild boy in his time and now spouts the Bible for delighted hecklers in Arroyo, Texas; his son, Byron, is his sharpest critic, while his other son, Dove, barefoot and hulking, is driven to try other horizons. There's Terasina, whose penitence is shattered by her sympathy; there are the trains and the shite towns; there is Kitty Twist and her young knowledge of lawlessness - this is the route that takes him to Old Perdido Street. Some shady selling jobs, life in the whorehouses, work with a specialized condom maker, panders and pimps, hustlers and ponces, Dove as a stud bum for a brother ??peepshow - and Dove, ruined by the vengeance of a legless cripple, returns home - another wild boy who has known the jungles of the depression. What is here is not for that conservative audience which will shock to the "lewdling", the people to whom "hard times is crazying", the sex crazy and all the blatant fierce cravings, but it is for those to whom a record - pornographic or no - of a period and a society has an importance - and a compassion. Obviously not for the thin skinned. (Kirkus Reviews)

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