"Mr Algren, boy, you are good."
Ernest Hemingway
The story of a naïve country boy who busts out of Hicksville, Texas, in pursuit of a better life in New Orleans. A Walk in the Wild Side is a large-hearted, funny, angry, lonely masterpiece, a book that has captured the imaginations of every generation since it first appeared in 1956, and that rendered a world later immortalised in
Lou Reed's classic song.
"Deserves to be 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 that before Heller and Kesey there was Algren. It's that Algren is where they came from."
Rolling Stone
"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 basis of our democracy. His hell burns with passion for heaven." New York Times Book Review
"Algren wrote with courage and love against the grain of the American empire ... embodying a vision of truth that seems strikingly contemporary." Richard Flanagan
