A Walk on the Wild Side

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Nelson Algren’s life is terrifying in its proof that talent, love and a determination to speak truth to power can destroy a writer as surely as mediocrity and compromise. A Walk on the Wild Side, the last of Algren’s novels to be published in his lifetime, is in consequence a most moving achievement. It was an act of courage by a man no longer sure of his country, no longer certain of either his own worth or his relevance, convinced only that he had lost the woman who was the great love of his life.

A Walk on the Wild Side is in some ways a desperate attempt by a writer to reassure himself that he can still write, a writer such as F. Scott Fitzgerald described himself as being in The Crack Up – a work at first something of a touchstone for Nelson Algren and later a chronicle of a disintegration foretold – who feels that he has become less through his writing, and worse, that he has nothing left to write. It is, then, a novel written against fate, by a writer who even at the height of his success in 1950 foresaw his own forlorn destiny as inextricably tied to his vocation as writer.

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