Somebody in Boots. Nelson Algren

       Introduction

      NELSON ALGREN WALKED into the Manhattan offices of The Vanguard Press on September 13th, 1933, and asked to speak with the person in charge. He was twenty-four-years old—5-foot eleven, maybe 150 pounds, gaunt and disheveled. For the past several days he had been sleeping in the back of a stranger’s car as it raced east along state roads from Chicago to New York City, by way of Niagara Falls. He had one published story to his name—no appointment, no agent, no manuscript.

      Vanguard’s owner agreed to meet anyway. His name was James Henle and he wasn’t put off by Nelson’s lack of pedigree. Before he became a publisher Henle had been a journalist. He signed muckrakers after taking over Vanguard. And the press had published Karl Marx in the past, and jeremiads like People Vs. Wall Street: A Mock Trial. A scruffy drifter from Chicago was a stretch for them, but not much of one.

      Henle invited Nelson into his office, and let him talk.

      Someone from Vanguard sent me a form letter last month after my first short story was published, Nelson explained. It asked: Are you working on a novel? And I’m here to answer. I don’t have a book, but I want to write one.

      Henle played along.

      What would you write about? He asked.

      I spent last year on the road, Nelson said. I train-hopped from Chicago to New Orleans, and then spent time in Texas. If I were going to write a book it would be about drifting. I would hop freight trains into the Rio Grande Valley, and sleep in hobo jungles and eat at Rescue Missions and write about what I saw.

      Henle liked the idea. The Great Depression was lumbering into its fourth year, but no one had written an account of the economic crisis like the one Nelson described.

      I’ll give you two hundred dollars to write that book, Henle said—half up front, spread across three months.

      Nelson had been out of work since he graduated from a state college with a degree in journalism twenty-six months earlier. His family had lost their life’s savings and their business to the real estate crash and bank closures. Unemployment was near twenty-five percent, so he accepted Henle’s terms.

      What will it cost you to travel south and begin working? Henle asked.

      Nelson considered the question. He calculated the price in his head and began to answer, but then he checked himself. It would be prudent to ask high, he reasoned.

      Ten dollars, he said. It will cost ten dollars to return to Texas and begin writing.

      And then Nelson watched, in awe of his own cunning, as Henle reached for his wallet and removed ten dollars in cash. It looked like a fortune to him. The year before, he had harvested grapefruit for less than a dollar a day. He thought Henle was an idiot for parting with so much money.

      “I really, really felt tickled with myself for taking that guy,” Nelson said later.

      •

      Nelson hopped a freight train the next day and headed toward Louisiana along the South Pacific line. His plan was simple. He would retrace the route he traveled the year before—New Orleans, then west into the Rio Grande Valley—and collect material as he went. Characters would emerge from among the people he met riding box cars; dialog would drift on the air; scenes would flash past as his trains rumbled through dusty southern towns. The book would practically write itself.

      It didn’t work out that way. Nelson caught a westbound train in New Orleans as planned, but he rode it for a thousand miles—much too far. He drifted through southern Texas, then north through unfamiliar terrain until he reached El Paso. He stopped there to reassess, and because the border was so close he crossed it and visited Ciudad Juárez and found an arena and watched a bull fight. A toreador waved his flag; he slashed with his sword. A drunken American yelled—“He’ll toss ’em all. This the bes’ ol’ bull ever was in these parts.” And when the carnage ended, Nelson was as lost as he had been before it began. He hopped a freight rolling east then and headed toward the setting of the novel he was supposed to be writing, but he didn’t make it far. The railroad police stopped his train outside Sanderson, Texas, and began walking the snaking line