A Walk on the wild side
By: Nelson Algren ; foreword by Russel Banks.
Contributors: Banks, Russel.
Publisher: Noonday Press
Published: 1998
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 346
Description: With its depictions of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, A Walk on the Wild Side found a place in the imaginations of all the generations that have followed since.

Perhaps his own words describe the book 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."