A Walk on the Wild Side

A Walk on the Wild Side

First edition cover
Author	Nelson Algren
Country	United States
Language	English
Publisher	Farrar, Straus and Cudahy
Publication date	1956
Media type	Print (hardback & paperback)
Pages	346 p. (paperback edition)
OCLC	62225900

A Walk on the Wild Side is a 1956 novel by Nelson Algren, most often quoted as the source for Algren's "three rules of life": "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."

Algren noted, "The book asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives."

Fitz Linkhorn barely managed to make a living pumping out cesspools, but his consuming vocation was "Born Again" preaching from the courthouse steps in Arroyo; it was a small, mostly Hispanic, and heavily Catholic town in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Fritz denounced all sins except drinking; because, being a drunk himself, he made sure he was both eloquently, and tastefully drunk as often as possible. He had two sons, Byron, who was weak and sickly, and Dove.

Dove had no education because his father had not wanted to send him to a school with a Catholic principal (And what else could there have been in Arroyo?). Instead, he was supposed to see movies with Byron to learn about life, but Dove never got to go; his brother did not have the price of a ticket. Dove got his education from the hoboes who hung around the Santa Fe tracks, telling one another what towns, lawmen, jails, and railroad bulls (deputized railroad police), to avoid.

Dove began hanging around the La Fe en Dios chili parlor in the ruins of the Hotel Crockett on the other side of town. The hotel was the place where Fitz had met the mother of his boys. The hotel was closed, but the seldom-visited café was run by Terasina Vidavarri, a wary woman who had been raped by a soldier. She continued Dove’s education by teaching him how to read from two books. One of the books was a children’s storybook; the other was about how to write business letters. When he was old enough (to enjoy her teaching); Terasina broadened Dove's education, by she and he becoming lovers.

Byron blackmailed Dove into stealing from the café, and Terasina knew that Dove had taken money out of the cash register. She kicked him out, but not before he raped her. Dove then left Arroyo on a freight train. Dove took up with a girl named Kitty Twist, a runaway from a children’s home, and saved her life when she was about to fall under the wheels of a train. When they attempted a burglary in Houston, Kitty was caught. Dove got away on a freight to New Orleans. One of the first things he saw in New Orleans was a man cutting the heads off turtles that were to be made into turtle soup and throwing the bodies into a pile. Even with the heads cut off, the bodies tried to climb to the top of the pile. One turtle was able to reach the top of the pile before it slid back to the bottom.