A Walk on the Wild Side

Name: A Walk on the Wild Side
Author: Nelson Algren
ISBN: 9780313202940

by Nelson Algren (1956)

Read Free Sample Buy on Amazon Audible Free Trial

About this book

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 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." -- Amazon.com.

Setting / LocationGlobal

Story EraLate 20th Century

Protagonist / CoreNotable Characters

Themes & Moods

Fiction & Literature Fiction & Literature National Book Award for Fiction 1957 Late 20th Century

Readers who enjoyed this also loved

These Thousand Hills

A. B. Guthrie

Conjuring up the ephemeral world of cattle ranchers in the 1880s, this intimate saga delights in a Montana community's boisterous, wanderlusting eccentrics as they chase after love and their unbridled ambitions. At its center is Lat Evans, good-hearted and yet seduced by the possibilities for prosperity in his new life; gradually he discerns how the perils of the natural world, and most especially human nature, can conspire to frustrate a young man's best intentions.

Frauen vor Flusslandschaft

Heinrich Böll

Frauen vor Flusslandschaft is a celebrated work by Heinrich Böll (Nobel Laureate), recognized for masterclass storytelling and lasting literary resonance.

The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty

This omnibus volume by one of the South's greatest writers includes stories published prior to 1980. Stories are as good in themselves and as influential on the aspirations of others as any since Hemingway's. The breadth of Welty's offering is finally most visible not in the variety of types--farce, satire, horror, lyric, pastoral, mystery--but in the clarity and solidity and absolute honesty of a lifetime's vision.

Notes to Myself My Struggle to Become a Person

James Baldwin

Notes to Myself My Struggle to Become a Person is a celebrated work by James Baldwin (National Book Award Finalist), recognized for masterclass storytelling and lasting literary resonance.