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A Walk on the Wild Side

by Nelson Algren, Russell Banks (Foreword)

3.99 · Rating details · 1,036 Ratings · 86 Reviews

With its depiction 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 imagination of all the generations that have followed since. As Algren admitted, it wasn't written until long after it had been walked... I found my way to the streets on the other side o ...more

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Paperback, 346 pages

Published June 24th 1998 by The Noonday Press (first published 1956)

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Feb 09, 2014 Mnemosyne rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, n-usa, e5

"...um homem que escreve e que não deve ser lido por quem não aguenta um murro. O Sr. Algren ataca com ambas as mãos, cerca-nos e mata-nos se não formos incrivelmente cuidadosos."
Ernest Hemingway

Não me matou mas deixou-me com cicatrizes...

Comprei este livro por duas razões:
1. Porque foi escrito em 1956...
2. Porque Sartre sofreu com o envolvimento de Simone de Beauvoir com Algren. E, depois de chegar ao fim deste Romance, posso afirmar que a minha lógica estava certa: Nelson Algren era Especial.

D ...more

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Jul 31, 2017 David Schaafsma rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction-20th-century, to-read-priority, class

Walk on the Wild Side, Lou Reed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wNkn...

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

Walk on the Wild Side is set in Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of depression-era New Orleans. With its depictions of an array of prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers, it is wild, but also warm, passionate, edgy, angry, funny. He wrote it soon after hanging out there for a time, and, “I've stayed pretty much on that side of the curb ever since." Algren never feels Walk on the Wild Side, Lou Reed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wNkn...

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

Walk on the Wild Side is set in Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of depression-era New Orleans. With its depictions of an array of prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers, it is wild, but also warm, passionate, edgy, angry, funny. He wrote it soon after hanging out there for a time, and, “I've stayed pretty much on that side of the curb ever since." Algren never feels like he is slumming. He’s with these people all the way.

Walk on the Wild Side is the story of Dove Linkhorn, a wild and naïve and cocky 16-year-old from a small Texas town who finds his way to New Orleans. The book predates and probably highly influenced books with out-of-control wild characters such as Heller’s Catch 22 and Kesey’s Cuckoo’s Nest. Oh, and almost anything by Kerouac, Bukowski, or Pynchon. I read it in part because I had recently read Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, which it would be grouped with, as well. Tacks back and forth between black humor and despair, with tolerance for all manner of individuals, a kind of moral map for democracy. Like Whitman, visceral.

“To this lopsided shambles owned by this unlicensed ghost, this speakeasy spook who had been alive once but died in the crash and was now only haunting the thirties, came trudging, some uphill and some down, all those who could not admit that the money was spent, the dream was over; the magic done. They still wore the clothes they wore before 1929 and no one knew when they might buy clothes again.”

"Never Come Morning " is my favorite Algren (so far), but this is very good. Hilarious and sad, lyrically melancholy. I listened to it on audiotape, which made the rich language come alive.

Algren summed his book up 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." ...more

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Jul 12, 2014 João Carlos rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: l2015

Nelson Algren (1909 – 1981)

”Vidas Perdidas” no original ”A Walk On The Wild Side” é um romance do escritor norte-americano Nelson Algren (1909 – 1981) publicado em 1956.
Nelson Algren é referenciado como um dos escritores mais original no panorama literário norte-americano, premiado com o “National Book Award” em 1949 com o romance ”The Man with the Golden Arm”; com uma vida recheada de problemas, com o jogo, com casamentos desastrosos, com a pobreza, com a prisão por roubo e pela relação amoros ...more

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Jul 22, 2011 Adam rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 1900-1969, prose

The bruised romantic's Bible: a sagacious tale of melancholy lostness underpinned by a fundamental, indubitable sense of something transcendentally positive underlying that hell.

Algren himself described it almost perfectly when he said: "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 ...more

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Nov 06, 2012 Ethan Miller rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

An amazing and beautiful ride! It would seem that Algren's name no longer rings in the counter culture lit canon the way that writers like Kerouac, Hunter S Thompson, Hubert Selby Jr, Bukowski, Pynchon and Burroughs do though you can find elements of all these writers by chance or by influence in Walk On The Wild Side. WOTWS is surely one of the great well springs from which tales of the American underbelly, druggy lit, road lit and even gonzo and many aspects of post modern writing would flow f ...more

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Oct 10, 2009 Stephen rated it it was amazing

HEADLINE: Lost American classic rediscovered by me!

How in the world did this American classic come to fall through the cracks? And why? From my point of view it is a novel about the depression that is an amalgam of Grapes of Wrath and Confederacy of Dunces. It is Grapes of Wrath with a profound sense of black humor. And it has sex.

Dove Linkhorn ought to be mentioned in the same breath as quintessential American heroes such as Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield, Dean Moriarity, Jay Gatsby, and t ...more

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Jun 16, 2013 David Bonesteel rated it it was amazing

Nelson Algren's novel relates the adventures of Dove Linkhorn, an illiterate young man who leaves poverty and a failed love affair behind him to wander the countryside. He has many adventures along the way until he settles for a time in New Orleans, where he will experience happiness and great tragedy.

Linkhorn is an appealing character, whose desire to better himself makes him easy to sympathize with. The real star of this novel, however, is Algren's prose. Hemingway himself felt that Algren was ...more

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Aug 07, 2007 Brian Engelhardt rated it it was amazing

Unbelievable! Pimps, prostitutes, alcoholics, thieves, drug addicts, drifters, abortionists, scam artists, barflies. . . every down-and-out person you're ever likely to meet is in here. Algren wrote about the kinds people and places that he knew best and his work reads like dark poetry. An amazing command of the English language!

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Jan 01, 2015 Reid rated it really liked it

Shelves: literature-classics, fiction, review, 4-stars, down-and-out, 2015

I owe Algren a review. He's definitely skilled, and attuned to the bittersweet, to the chasm that occurs between feelings and behavior, especially when it comes to romance or dalliance, and perhaps especially with the down-and-out and poor. The sympathy comes across, but it feels not as if it's the narrator's sympathy, but only our own. Algren rides a fine line, as if it's simply his element, the stuff he breathes, and he places us right there, in the dried dirt of Texas and anything-goes New Or I owe Algren a review. He's definitely skilled, and attuned to the bittersweet, to the chasm that occurs between feelings and behavior, especially when it comes to romance or dalliance, and perhaps especially with the down-and-out and poor. The sympathy comes across, but it feels not as if it's the narrator's sympathy, but only our own. Algren rides a fine line, as if it's simply his element, the stuff he breathes, and he places us right there, in the dried dirt of Texas and anything-goes New Orleans during the great depression, amidst the bars and whorehouses and poverty stricken streets. Some passages and scenes are just perfectly expressed, and his penchant for rhyming words is a kick. The personal give and take, and conflicted feelings, between the 16 yr old illiterate hero Dove Linkhorn and the beautiful cafe/bar owner, Terasina, 20 years his senior, - who is still psychologically recovering from one of the most memorably despicable characters that could be described in just a page or two - is pretty special, as is his acquaintance with a lonely hobo girl dressed as a boy who seems fairly desperate for a friend:

Dove got a slab of cornbread in molasses and a stack of beans piled so neatly they appeared to have been counted one by one. When he considered how many he had picked he felt that, percentage-wise, he was getting a bad count. "Everyone always gets more than me," he complained, and the girl pushed her plate before him again. "Why you so good to me?" Dove asked. "Because I want YOU to be good to me," she told him so frankly that he felt he must be doing her a favor and cleaned up every crumb.

In part the book is about the education or maturation of Dove, but it's a tough path and he's on his own, being essentially a runaway from his dead end life with his preacher widower father and his drunken brother.

The novel itself falters a bit, seemed to get sidetracked with some other characters that were not nearly as interesting, but there are plenty of scenes that continue to make it worthwhile - like a scene depicting their hard scrabble life as a huge pile of turtles on a butcher’s block, scrambling over each other in a bloody slipping mess - and some really nice writing, like the two unconnected quotes that I'll close with...

While the moon that could never wane looked on, on brandy, silver comb and wine... Keeping time to the rolling man lashed fast between those black-meshed thighs, breathing her breath as she breathed his till she moaned his lips apart... Her eyelids fluttered in the drains of her passion - it had not happened to her before like this. Fitz had felt the flutter against his cheek. The pianola roll whispered on and on, it had not happened to him before so heart-shakingly as this. And the moon that could never wane dimmed down to no more than a gas lamp’s leaning glow. Drinkers and dancers, gaffers and gamblers, all had gone.

"There's a hundred or so under your comb and brush," he told her - "that's one way to anywhere. See you in jail." And so, having salvaged his pride at the cost of his heart, he left.

See you all in jail!
...more

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Nov 14, 2012 Greg Deane rated it really liked it

A Walk on the Wild Side is a particularly dark and hopeless book, where the voyeuristic prurience deprives any pleasurable intimacy that provides a glimmer of loving redemption to any of the characters. Even on those occasions when there is a half promise of stolen happiness, the baseness and fears of the characters destroys their improbable aspirations. Similarly, the struggle for economic survival, of dignity through work, or even belief in God, is cruelly abnegated at each turn.

Being set amon ...more

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Jul 05, 2012 Ryan Holiday rated it really liked it

A story about the old French Quarter and New Orleans of the 1930s. A story encompassing midget pimps, legless former circus strongmen, Southern aristocrats suffering from "black mammy syndrome," conniving door-to-door salesmen, prostitutes, hustlers, runaways named Kitty Twist, the sane, the insane, the homeless, the insane sane homeless masquerading as eighteenth century admirals, and condom factories. A story of delicate depth and one of those novels that works best when viewed as a whole. The ...more

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Jul 28, 2011 Phillip rated it really liked it

Shelves: 20th-century-prose

A really great work from a now underestimated writer. Algren's story of the Depression-era New Orleans underworld is riveting--not only for its depictions of prostitutes, pimps, junkies, and conmen, but because of the enigmatic protagonist. Dove Linkhorn is a paradoxical figure, at once seemingly ignorant and yet strangely talented. Dove is gifted with an unrealistic sexual capacity and a natural talent for math, yet his identity remains incomplete based on his illiteracy.

What's really very inte ...more

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May 04, 2013 Anne Simpson rated it liked it

Though the writing is very impressive - descriptive, ironic, poetic, I couldn't get into the story because none of the characters is developed enough for me to care much about them. It felt long and repetitious. Many of the characters seemed like caricatures rather than real people. Dove Linkhorn, the main character, was some what sympathetic though not entirely, as he often contributed to his own situation.

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Nov 12, 2010 Victor Giron rated it it was amazing

Reading Nelson Algren for the first time, about 4 years ago, made me want to quit trying to write because the man perfected it. Talk about combining prose and poetry. And the characters he creates are unbelieveable. But I kept going understanding that I'd always be inferior, and that's ok, to be inerior to Nelson Algren, it's more than just ok.

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Aug 03, 2014 Jerod Duris rated it it was amazing

I put this one off for a long time, knowing it was Algren's most popular, but then I kept encountering references to it involving Hunter Thompson. It is clearly the most outstanding of the 4-5 Algren books I've read. A brilliant feat of modernism, like a cross between Grapes of Wrath and Naked Lunch.

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Jan 27, 2016 Julie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: audible

I can't remember the last time I read something so beautifully written. Algren had an ear for the poetry of regional al speech and the wisdom of the uneducated.

the events of the story may depict an ugly part of society but the language is just So Beautiful. I couldn't put it down.

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Nov 23, 2011 Elliott rated it liked it · review of another edition

"And the coloured girls say

Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo
doo"

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Feb 25, 2014 The Literary Chick rated it it was amazing

Shelves: literature

If you like your characters damaged and your prose poetic, this is the book for you. No author does it better.

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May 15, 2017 Lyndsay rated it it was ok

Shelves: fiction

Excellent writing but unremittingly grim!

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Apr 14, 2013 Sumner Wilson rated it it was amazing

What did I think? Thought it was great.

A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren is a crazy rollick through New Orleans in 1930-'31, in that era. Published in '56. Crest books reprinted it in paperback in '62.

We follow the insane adventures--misadventures--of Dove Linkhorn, a red-neck illiterate from Aurora, Texas, by rail. Freight, that is, in boxcars he jumps on his way out of town. He splits from Aurora because of a fall from grace from the gal he falls in love with, Terasina, his employer. What did I think? Thought it was great.

A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren is a crazy rollick through New Orleans in 1930-'31, in that era. Published in '56. Crest books reprinted it in paperback in '62.

We follow the insane adventures--misadventures--of Dove Linkhorn, a red-neck illiterate from Aurora, Texas, by rail. Freight, that is, in boxcars he jumps on his way out of town. He splits from Aurora because of a fall from grace from the gal he falls in love with, Terasina, his employer. He gets into her undies one morning, leaves her in bed, goes downstairs to the café she owns, and emboldened by his success with Terasina in bed, he figures she can't do without him, and opens her cash register. This is a sad mistake. Terasina comes tearing downstairs and tosses old Dove out her joint on his head. This, of course, is why he splits.

He meets up with a young seventeen years old gal, but she is more like two-thousand years old in experience. She talks Dove into a B&A., while she waits outside as look-out. She is nabbed, but Dove escapes, and hits the rails again.

In New Orleans his eyes are knocked out by the marvels of this amazing city of all sins. By and by, he links up with a pimp who recognizes Dove's talents as a cocksman, and puts him to work having his way with "virgins" while paid perverts peek through peepholes to watch Dove's expertise with the "virgins." Of course, these are not virgins, but are old-head whores pimped by Finnerty, who goes shares in the cash with Dove.

Dove can't stand up under the weight of his success, however, and is well on his way to the gutter via the bottle. He is saved by an octoroon beauty, Hallie, who goes into hiding with Dove, and among other things teaches him to read. The problem is, Hallie has a jealous boyfriend. A cat name of Schmidt who has one leg off at the knee, the other one off at the hip, and gets around right fine on a flat-board scooter he straps himself onto. Before he lost his legs, Schmidt had been an awesome athlete who was employed as a stooge in a wrestling team making decent dough. Schmidt still has enormous strength in his shoulders and arms, and is feared from one end of old Perdido Street to the other. He starts on a search for Dove and Hallie--well, he couldn't care less about Dove, but just wants Hallie back.

In the meantime, Dove gets tossed into jail, which saves him temporarily. When he gets out the jug six-months later, Schmidt still hasn't found Hallie. He does find Dove, however, in Dockerty's Dollhouse, a saloon that bills itself as the last speakeasy in the country. A wild and hellish place. What happens next I'll leave to those who want to read it for themselves. It isn't pretty. But it is a great read.

A fellow by name of E. Hemingway--who'n hell is he?--claims that Algren is a man's writer, plus a few more words that I'll not bother to go into here. It's late and time goes by too damned fast as 'tis, and I've spent way too much of it on this review. Jeez, how many words have I wasted?

Sumner
...more

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Jun 12, 2010 Stephanie Griffin rated it really liked it

A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE, by one of the most outstanding novelists of the 20th century, Nelson Algren, is another amazing example of his inimitable style. Here he follows illiterate Dove, a teenager from an outback town, to depression-era Louisiana (last century’s depression, not the current one). He ends up on Perdido Street, a part of New Orleans where prostitutes, the disabled, drunks, and cons mingled.
This is a critique on the unfairness of the wealth distribution in this country which contin A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE, by one of the most outstanding novelists of the 20th century, Nelson Algren, is another amazing example of his inimitable style. Here he follows illiterate Dove, a teenager from an outback town, to depression-era Louisiana (last century’s depression, not the current one). He ends up on Perdido Street, a part of New Orleans where prostitutes, the disabled, drunks, and cons mingled.
This is a critique on the unfairness of the wealth distribution in this country which continues to this day. A time of “Self-reliance for the penniless and government aid for those who already had more than they could use..."
Algren’s style in this book is fabulous, sometimes sing-song rhyme, sometimes slow and wistful, with a southern drawl. “To this lopsided shambles owned by this unlicensed ghost, this speakeasy spook who had been alive once but died in the crash and was now only haunting the thirties, came trudging, some uphill and some down, all those who could not admit that the money was spent, the dream was over; the magic done. They still wore the clothes they wore before 1929 and no one knew when they might buy clothes again.”
Sometimes Dove isn’t even aware how miserable his situation is. After all, it’s all he knows.
“…when he saw men encircling someone or something down the street he hurried there as fast as his butter-colored shoes could make steps…
…a little round man with something glistening in his hand. Dove elbowed in to see what glistened so nicely.
A cawfee pot.
Hello, pot.
Shor a purty old pot.
“Wreneger’s the name,” the little round man was telling his crew, “but you can call me plain old ‘Smiley”…”
Little old red ’n green cawfee pot. Well I be dawg. Bet you make right good cawfee.
“The idea aint to see how many doors you can rap of a morning-THAT aint sellin’…”
I had me a cawfee pot like you, cawfee pot, I’d know where to get the chicory for you.
”Heed the housewife’s woes, boys. Give ear to her trials and little cares. Make her joys your joys, her tears your tears…sooner or later she’s going to ask ‘Young man, whatever is that contraption in your hand?’”
“Look like a cawfee pot to me,” Dove helped the man out.
“Thank you, Red. You work with me…”
A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE examines exceptionally well the existence of some of the truly poor during the early 1930’s and I recommend it highly.
...more

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Feb 10, 2017 Rick Homuth rated it it was amazing

Counting this as one of the books I read in 2017 because I re-read it to research for an in-progress essay, and that's good enough for me. "A Walk on the Wild Side" isn't my favorite Algren book (it will forever lag behind his two Chicago novels, "The Man with the Golden Arm" and "Never Come Morning," in that order), but it might be the most well put-together. It's far more accessible than his Chicago novels, and while it's certainly depressing in its own way, the books is more absurdly hilariou ...more

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Apr 01, 2009 Michael rated it it was ok

Shelves: books-into-film, own-it, collectible, reviewed, historical, hardboiled, read-in-2010

Dove Linkhorn, son of a preacher, is an uneducated sixteen year old on the Texas Mexican border. He asis a Mexican waitress, Terasina, to teach him to read the Sunday papers. He does mechanical work for truckers who stop at the restaurant and is so green that after doing lengthy work for one trucker, when asked his price, Dove gives such a low figure that Terasina corrects him. She tells the trucker a more realistic price and reminds him to give the boy a tip.

The novel describes the hard times t ...more

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Jun 30, 2013 John Defrog rated it really liked it

By the strangest coincidence, I was in the middle of reading this when Lou Reed passed away. Of course the book inspired Reed’s song of the same name, which is part of the reason I picked it up. The other reason, though, was Hunter S Thompson’s reference to it in Hell’s Angels – taking Algren’s description of the Linkhorns as the metaphorical origin of nomadic American white trash, and suggesting that the Hell’s Angels were the logical extension of that lineage. Anyway, the book chronicles the a ...more

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Dec 22, 2013 David B rated it it was amazing

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Jun 09, 2013 Downward rated it really liked it

nelson algren lays a breadcrumb trail of three main characters (dove, a simple-minded wanderer; oliver finnerty, a pimp; and schmidt, a crippled wrestler) to lead us through new orleans in the early thirties. the book can be divided into roughly three sections: dove's wanderings; the brothel; and dove in prison. the characters tie together at the brothel, and their interactions with each other (and with the prostitutes) are at the same time comical and harrowing: the actions and dialogue are car ...more

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Oct 04, 2011 Graham rated it really liked it

As a small rating note, I wish we could give half-stars. I feel like this was a little better than a 3, but not quite a 4. Still pretty great though.

But technical details aside, "Walk On The Wild Side" is an excellent portrayal of the seamier underbelly of Depression-era America. Prostitutes, pimps, drug addicts, and thieves all intermingle in what often appears as a mirror-image of a conventional society that is only occasionally interacted with, and in those circumstances only long enough to c ...more

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Sep 23, 2015 David H rated it liked it

A mixed bag for me. The style is great and the depiction of the downtrodden and the victims is raw and visceral. Best lines in the book: When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves, the only way of getting richer is cutting off those who do not have enough. If everyone has more than enough what good is my more than enough? What good is a wide meadow open to everyone? It isn't until the others are fenced out that the open pasture ...more

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Mar 13, 2008 Christopher Flynn rated it really liked it

Shelves: 20th-century, novel

This book meant a lot to me a long time ago. It's an intensely written, sardonic, cynical, angry and lyrical book. All of those things, not necessarily in that order. It was the type of book I needed back then, or at least that I felt drawn to.

The voice is intense and fully realized, which is a great thing in a novel (obviously). The voice is more important than the plot, which I hardly remember at this point. Sort of like On the Road if Kerouac had written instead of typed. I think that's a pa ...more

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Aug 19, 2012 Paul rated it really liked it

And so, the most Chicago of authors takes a walk through a few other demimondes (word?) on provides his readers with a tour of America's sexual underground, circa mid-century. Algren is, of course, less judgmental towards the purveyors of sleaze than he is towards its hypocritical customers, which I suppose is sensationalistic in and of itself. The protagonist, Dove, is a simple-minded goon, more naive and gullible than actually innocent, which makes him quite real if not especially likable. The ...more

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About Nelson Algren

Born of Swedish-immigrant parents, Nelson Ahlgren Abraham moved at an early age from Detroit to Chicago. At Illinois University he studied journalism. His experiences as a migrant worker during the Depression provided the material for his first novel Somebody in Boots (1935). Throughout his life Algren identified with the American underdog. From 1936 to 1940 (the highpoint of left-wing ideas on th ...more

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“Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.” — 30 likes

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