Somebody in Boots is the picaresque story of Cass McKay, an illiterate youth from a Texas border town "where even children drank and smoked." Driven from home by a violent father, Cass becomes the prototypical wandering hobo of the early 1930s.
Originally titled "Native Son," Somebody in Boots, dedicated to "Those innumerable thousands: The Homeless Boys of America," is a proletarian novel by an author disillusioned with the American Dream and the standard concept of success. Algren was aligned with the Communist party when he wrote the novel, although he was not a member. He continued to support the party, line advanced in the Soviet Union by the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers until the late 1930s, when the Federal Writers Project gave him a job and a chance to write. Of Somebody in Boots, Algren says in a 1973 letter, "It was dead-serious. It was dead-serious because the author was dead-serious. . . . No room for laughs. Survival was the story and revolution the theme. The Proletariat was about to rise and build the New Jerusalem on the ashes of Capitalist Imperialism. The book was originally intended as a trumpet-call to arms."
Somebody in Boots has an erratic style, ranging from tender romance to didactic Marxism.
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