A Walk on the Wild Side … deserves to be read by every Catch 22 and Cuckoo's Nest freak just so they can find out what opened the door for two novels that had the same kind of effect on the changing American consciousness that Bob Dylan has had. It's not only that before Heller and Kesey there was Algren. It's that Algren is where they came from, and the fantasy/reality, inside/outside paradoxical view of the inversion of the American Dream that is central to their books was first laid out by Algren in A Walk on the Wild Side.

Algren got to where he was when he wrote that book by discovering, during the depths of the Depression, that the whores and the pimps and the junkies and the thieves (even before the Bonnie & Clyde/Robin Hood mythology) dealt with the reality of America, and in their dealing exposed the hypocrisy of the whole social structure….

Up until Algren, no American writer had really combined a poetic gift for words and a vision of the truth about the textbook democracy. He saw it, gradually or all at once makes no difference, and he put it down in the one novel which blew the minds of hundreds of other writers and had the effect—very specifically on Kesey and Heller—that Robert Johnson had on the Cream and Mick Jagger.

And when he had said it all … he tried for a while to do other things, turning, like Mailer, to journalism and then finally, like Dylan, turning off to a private world. It is an odd relationship, the literature of Algren and the song/poetry of Dylan. They cover the same territory, see the same images with or without different faces and different names, and no one familiar with the inhabitants of the night world where Algren took his wild side walk was startled to meet the images of Dylan's apocalyptical visions….

When he wrote A Walk on the Wild Side, Algren did not really believe that the whole thing had gone out of control. He believed in a kind of goodness indigenous to the American scene or at least possible in the American scene. He believed, too, in a kind of non-secular God, I suspect.