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...