A Walk on the Wild Side
Categories: Literature & Fiction
Nelson Algren's 1956 novel follows Dove Linkhorn, an illiterate young drifter from the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, who leaves home on a freight train early in the Depression. Riding the rails, Dove reaches New Orleans, where he sells coffee and beauty certificates, works for a condom maker and lands in a Perdido Street brothel. There he falls for Hallie Breedlove, a onetime schoolteacher who teaches him to read, while her lover, the legless strongman Achilles Schmidt, seethes.
Recommended by 1 person
- Ryan Holiday: “A story about the old French Quarter and New Orleans of the 1930s.”