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Somebody in Boots
Nelson Algren was a renowned writer, known for his penetrating and influential social novels such as The Man with the Golden Arm and A Walk on the Wild Side. Originally published in 1935, Somebody in Boots was Algren's first novel, based on his experiences living in Texas during the Great Depression. A wonderful companion to Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, this new edition of Somebody in Boots features an introduction by Colin Asher, who is writing a forthcoming biography of Algren.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1935
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327 people want to read
About the author
Nelson Algren
65 books292 followersPeople note American writer Nelson Algren for his novels, including
The Man with the Golden Arm
(1949), about the pride and longings of impoverished people.
Born of Swedish-immigrant parents, Nelson Ahlgren Abraham moved at an early age to Chicago. At University of Illinois, he studied journalism. His experiences as a migrant worker during the Depression provided the material for his first Somebody in Boots (1935). Throughout life, Algren identified with the underdog. From 1936 to 1940, the high-point of left-wing ideas on the literary scene of the United States, he served as editor of the project in Illinois. After putting the finishing touches to his second, he in 1942 joined and enlisted for the war. Never Come Morning received universal acclaim and eventually sold more than a million copies.
A dark naturalist style of Algren passionately records the details of trapped urban existence with flashes of melancholy poetry. He characterizes the lowlife drifters, whores, junkies, and barflies of row. He records the bravado of their colloquial language and lays their predicament bare.
Born of Swedish-immigrant parents, Nelson Ahlgren Abraham moved at an early age to Chicago. At University of Illinois, he studied journalism. His experiences as a migrant worker during the Depression provided the material for his first Somebody in Boots (1935). Throughout life, Algren identified with the underdog. From 1936 to 1940, the high-point of left-wing ideas on the literary scene of the United States, he served as editor of the project in Illinois. After putting the finishing touches to his second, he in 1942 joined and enlisted for the war. Never Come Morning received universal acclaim and eventually sold more than a million copies.
A dark naturalist style of Algren passionately records the details of trapped urban existence with flashes of melancholy poetry. He characterizes the lowlife drifters, whores, junkies, and barflies of row. He records the bravado of their colloquial language and lays their predicament bare.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
August 8, 2008
It is truly a shame that this book is out of print. It's Nelson Algren's first novel, published in 1935, before he became famous for his Chicago novels. This one takes place in part in Texas (part of it were excerpted in The Texas Stories of Nelson Algren, which is also worth tracking down if you're into this sort of thing). Anyone interested in fiction about hoboes/tramps and/or proletarian fiction should check it out. It is explicitly anti-capitalist in its politics, but the plot and characterization are satisfyingly complicated, rather than merely didactic. (There are some rants towards the end, but even those are formally interesting, because the are delivered by the third-person narrator and thus interrupt the text deliberately; it would be interesting to contrast this polemical method with, say, that of the twenty-page speech delivered by the defense attorney toward the end of Native Son.) The descriptions are brutal (the book contains descriptions of beatings, sex, and both hetero- and homosexual rape), so that the protagonist's circumstances are not romanticized, as they often are in other writings about tramps.
March 9, 2013
If you’ve never read anything by Nelson Algren, don’t start with Somebody in Boots. Start with Never Come Morning or The Man with the Golden Arm. Somebody in Boots is Algren’s first novel, and it shows. However, if you’re already familiar with his later books and short stories, it’s a fascinating look at his early development as a writer in addition to being a fairly strong piece of work in its own right.
Fundamentally, Somebody in Boots is written in a less subtle style than the one Algren later perfected. This goes both for its overall thematic development and for its relatively simple prose style. For instance, while nearly all of his work is in keeping with his stated vision of “bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock,” in books like Never Come Morning he does this indirectly, by using his unique brand of understated and horrifying realism to force each of his readers -- judges all -- to empathize with people that America teaches us all to dehumanize and despise. This element of surprise, where, three pages into a short story, the astonished reader finds himself rooting, at the gut level, for the protagonist to score some morphine for his girlfriend, is part of what makes Algren’s writing so powerful. In contrast, with Somebody in Boots, he names a character The Judge, gives him Boots to Represent Authority and Power, and so clubs the reader over the head with a fairly blunt allegory. When combined with a quantity of Karl Marx quotes that even Algren seems to have found embarrassing later in life, the overall impression is that the author hasn’t yet entirely unlearned all of the deconstructionist bullshit that they taught him in English 101 at Urbana–Champaign. At a more basic level, Somebody in Boots is written in a stripped down and journalistic style – something that’s neither bad nor even particularly striking until one compares it to the mesmerizing, almost rap-like prose poetry in Chicago: City on the Make and A Walk on the Wild Side, with their line-by-line attention to rhythm and word choice.
This overall lack of subtlety, however, offers a look at the process by which Algren developed his stories, before he had completely honed it. One element that jumps right out on a number of occasions is his practice of recording actual conversations and snippets of real-world dialogue that he picked up through a process of hanging around in police stations and seedy dives with a notebook; he would then incorporate these into his writing, sometimes over and over, changing the context but not the language. Hence, six or seven French models “in the extream nood” found their way into Never Come Morning in 1942 and Topless in Gaza, 36 years later. In Somebody in Boots, about a fifth of the way through the book, a young transient tells the story of a murder to no one in particular – an interlude so detached from the rest of the story that one feels it must have actually happened, and that the author felt that it was so powerful on its own that it just had to be included in his book. One can almost imagine 24 year-old Nelson Algren, his journalism degree still soaking up sweat in his back pocket, sitting on a railroad siding in West Texas somewhere trying to scribble down the whole thing before the original storyteller finishes.
In the end, and perhaps importantly for a writer whose work was often, unfairly, marketed as pulp fiction, Somebody in Boots is a page turner. There is a huge amount of material woven into just over 250 pages, and the plot moves quickly, so there’s no excuse not to pick it up and finish it over the course of a train ride.
Fundamentally, Somebody in Boots is written in a less subtle style than the one Algren later perfected. This goes both for its overall thematic development and for its relatively simple prose style. For instance, while nearly all of his work is in keeping with his stated vision of “bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock,” in books like Never Come Morning he does this indirectly, by using his unique brand of understated and horrifying realism to force each of his readers -- judges all -- to empathize with people that America teaches us all to dehumanize and despise. This element of surprise, where, three pages into a short story, the astonished reader finds himself rooting, at the gut level, for the protagonist to score some morphine for his girlfriend, is part of what makes Algren’s writing so powerful. In contrast, with Somebody in Boots, he names a character The Judge, gives him Boots to Represent Authority and Power, and so clubs the reader over the head with a fairly blunt allegory. When combined with a quantity of Karl Marx quotes that even Algren seems to have found embarrassing later in life, the overall impression is that the author hasn’t yet entirely unlearned all of the deconstructionist bullshit that they taught him in English 101 at Urbana–Champaign. At a more basic level, Somebody in Boots is written in a stripped down and journalistic style – something that’s neither bad nor even particularly striking until one compares it to the mesmerizing, almost rap-like prose poetry in Chicago: City on the Make and A Walk on the Wild Side, with their line-by-line attention to rhythm and word choice.
This overall lack of subtlety, however, offers a look at the process by which Algren developed his stories, before he had completely honed it. One element that jumps right out on a number of occasions is his practice of recording actual conversations and snippets of real-world dialogue that he picked up through a process of hanging around in police stations and seedy dives with a notebook; he would then incorporate these into his writing, sometimes over and over, changing the context but not the language. Hence, six or seven French models “in the extream nood” found their way into Never Come Morning in 1942 and Topless in Gaza, 36 years later. In Somebody in Boots, about a fifth of the way through the book, a young transient tells the story of a murder to no one in particular – an interlude so detached from the rest of the story that one feels it must have actually happened, and that the author felt that it was so powerful on its own that it just had to be included in his book. One can almost imagine 24 year-old Nelson Algren, his journalism degree still soaking up sweat in his back pocket, sitting on a railroad siding in West Texas somewhere trying to scribble down the whole thing before the original storyteller finishes.
In the end, and perhaps importantly for a writer whose work was often, unfairly, marketed as pulp fiction, Somebody in Boots is a page turner. There is a huge amount of material woven into just over 250 pages, and the plot moves quickly, so there’s no excuse not to pick it up and finish it over the course of a train ride.
June 19, 2009
(This is part 1 of a special 14-part essay series I'm writing this summer for my arts center, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:], examining in detail nearly the entire ouevre of controversial Chicago author Nelson Algren, on the occasion of his 100th birthday this year. For an introduction to this series, as well as links to all the other essays, you can visit this page at the CCLaP website.)
[Photo purposely missing:]
The shot you're looking at above is of the Chicago street address 4834 North Troy, in the Albany Park neighborhood on the city's northwest side, a crucial location for any serious discussion regarding Nelson Algren; for it was here that Algren was to live full-time from the age of twelve until the start of college, and then part-time on and off after that all the way to nearly thirty. As you can see, as of 2009 the neighborhood has become a "creative class" one, full of web designers and ad-agency execs and all kinds of other shiny happy white-collar Loop workers, but this was not always the case; back when Algren was there in the 1920s and '30s, for example, it was mostly a working-class neighborhood, full of such blue-collar immigrants as Germans and Poles, with income levels that spanned from medium to low instead of medium to high like is the case now. And this is in fact yet another important thing to know about Algren early into any examination of his life and work; that according to Bettina Drew in her 1989 biography Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side, far from picking up the habit as an earnest liberal undergraduate, as is the case with so many writers who end up "championing the downtrodden," Algren just naturally preferred the company of the lowest-end citizens of his neighborhood even as a boy, from what seems to be simply a high natural curiosity about the world almost from birth, and an inherent disdain for the normal and blase.
It's an important thing to remember, because it's a big factor behind Algren's early successes; because as he traversed his early twenties (and history's 1920s) as a college student at the University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana, he of course fell in more and more with the growing group of young, radically liberal artists who defined the Early Modernist era, most of them squeaky-clean middle-classers with an intense desire to show off the plight of society's worst-off, but who had never actually hung out with a prostitute or stepped into a gambling hall to save their lives. Algren however was not only a regular at such haunts already, but was an intimate acquaintance of many of those whose lives revolved around such dens of iniquity, the people who Karl Marx called the "lumpen-proletariat" in The Communist Manifesto (a sort of holy bible to this group of young leftists of the 1920s and '30s); not the usual working-class but the lowest of the low, the cripples and addicts and mentally-challenged who lack even the basic faculties to become productive members of society, who in pre-Roosevelt America were essentially left to wither and die on their own, the very people that communism was theoretically designed to most help.
In fact, like it seems with so many Early Modernist artists, Algren ended up having quite an adventurous young life before becoming a full-time writer, one that kept him in close contact with the very people he would end up building his award-winning stories around. A sober and hard-working student of journalism, French and sociology at Champaign, he ended up rushing through his degree so to be able to get a job in the lucrative "Roaring Twenties" that much faster; but then he ended up graduating right at the start of the Great Depression in the early '30s, the holder of a now worthless degree who found himself in the same soup lines as everyone else. It was at this point, Drew says, that Algren spent several years actually living the full-time life of a "hobo," which to modern ears might need a bit of a clarification; because far from being small bunches of panhandling stragglers like we think of the homeless today, in the Great Depression hoboes were an entire economic class, hundreds of thousands of young people who simply roamed the countryside from day to day looking for whatever temporary labor they could find, crisscrossing the US once or twice every single month through the dangerous activity of "train-hopping," not the romantic notion we think of it today but rather a perilous and highly illegal endeavor that always carried the chance of violent injury and death.
It was during these years that Algren saw with his own eyes the kind of human indignities that his peers only read about; of young women having miscarriages in freight cars and then bleeding to death, of young boys trying to hop a rail, missing, and getting their legs cleanly chopped off by the rushing wheels. And when Algren got busted once in 1934 for stealing a typewriter from a half-empty community college in small-town Texas, the month he spent in a county jail awaiting trial was what he considered ever after as one of the most harrowing of his life, and gave him direct knowledge of the pre-civil-rights squalor, 'convict justice,' and complex homoerotic/homophobic sexual politics that were a part of the American prison system even then. So no wonder, then, when he finally got settled for a time again in Chicago, and started getting more and more involved with the local chapter of the John Reed Society (a formal network of communist-sympathizing urban intellectuals in the pre-McCarthy US), it was Algren who was most admired among his new circle of friends (including famed black author Richard Wright) for bringing such a high level of authenticity and attention to detail to his work, in a way that his ivory-towered peers simply couldn't.
It was at this point, in fact, that Algren's career finally started taking off, after almost a decade of on-and-off writing in a more traditional vein; spurred by his Reed friends' insistence that he write more about his true experiences as a 'bo, his melodramatic stories of Man Dispossessed started quickly striking a chord within the exact crowd of leftist intellectuals who were desperately seeking such stories. It was one of these tales, in fact -- "So Help Me," based on the real experience of Algren and two of his drifter pals once trying to re-open an abandoned gas station in the Deep South -- that brought him to the attention of Vanguard Press in New York, who supposedly sent him a simple query letter one day seeing if he just happened to be working on a full-length novel; claiming years later that he simply had nothing better to do, he ended up hopping a freight-train to New York that very week, and by the end of the visit had finagled Vanguard into a book contract, with them agreeing to front the money for him to live cheaply in Texas again for another three months, and with him promising to deliver a full manuscript at the end. In true artistic fashion, he missed that first deadline, although finally did deliver on the book; and that's how it is that we have Algren's 1935 debut novel, Somebody in Boots, which both he and his commie friends were convinced was going to make him known as "the American Gorky," and help usher in a glorious new revolution in Modernist political thought.
But there turned out to be a problem with Boots, succinctly summed up by fellow writer (and secretly-brought-on editor) James Farrell; namely, it was a barely readable mess, and destined in its original form to cause embarrassment to nearly everyone associated with it. And sure, maybe Farrell wasn't exactly the best person to be making such an assessment objectively -- although a fellow communist sympathizer, he couldn't stand what he called the simplified preaching of the "Proletariat Novel," and in fact didn't hold at all with the Stalinist idea of all artistic projects somehow needing to serve the state, a position that Reedites agreed with quite strongly. But then again, maybe this made Farrell exactly the most perfect person to come on as secret editor; because as we all know by now, no matter how noble the intentions, a book simply needs to touch something profound within the general zeitgeist in order to be a big success, and with the majority of American citizens at that time much more like Farrell than Algren himself, left-leaning but not radical and certainly in no mood for a violent revolution.
Now that I've read the book myself, in fact, I can easily see what people complained about when it first came out, and can perfectly understand the mixture of respect and frustration for the novel among those who take their Modernist literature seriously. It's ultimately the story of one Cass McKay, not an autobiographical portrait of Algren himself but rather of one of the typical "lumpens" he spent time with back then -- barely intelligent, quick to anger and with a bad taste for whiskey, he seems almost born to live the hobo lifestyle, the product of an abusive home and with almost no formal education under his belt. The novel itself, then, is a 260-page record of life taking a nearly continuous dump on Cass as he stumbles his way through the Great Depression (known among the 'boes as "the Big Trouble"), which like I said is mostly made up of experiences Algren actually had during his own drifter years; by the time our story is over, not only have all the real events I've already mentioned taken place to the fictional Cass, but also the gang-rape of a young black woman traveling by herself, the unwanted turning of Cass's sister into a prostitute, the forced feeding of rancid meat to hundreds of vagrants by a corrupt do-gooder church receiving New Deal government money, the horrific death of a prisoner from untreated tuberculosis, and all kinds of other wonderful life-affirming experiences like these.
It's when Algren gets lost inside these stories that he really cooks, when he forgets about Making A Grand Point and simply describes in exquisite, poetic detail what the experiences were actually like -- take for example his masterful description of a low-class burlesque house in Chicago's South Loop that Cass ends up working at for awhile, which I swear to God by the end made me feel like I had actually visited it in real life myself -- and in fact Algren himself came to understand more and more that this is where his true strength as a writer laid, honing this aspect to razor sharpness in such later masterpieces as The Man with the Golden Arm. But unfortunately, the highly political 25-year-old Algren did feel the need in his first novel to Make A Grand Point, and it is always at these overwritten, overanalyzed moments that the book most suffers; take for example his bad habit of writing accented regional dialogue phonetically, which threatens to make the novel utterly unreadable during several long stretches. (Confused by what I'm talking about? Take this random example: "Well, y'all see, when ah fight a man ah just go all-to-pieces like, so sometime it happen ah don' rightly know ex-acly what is it ah hev got in mah han'." UGH.)
And of course it doesn't help that each section of the novel starts with a highly intellectual quote from The Communist Manifesto itself, a jarring schism from the plain-spoken social-realist tone of the actual book; and it also doesn't help that the entire last 50 pages essentially becomes one big lefty sermon, with Algren using Chicago's real 1932 World's Fair (unfortunately planned when times were good, but not open until after the Great Depression hit) as a heavy-handed metaphor for class inequality, comparing the glittering lights on one side of the fairground fence with the trash-picking street orphans on the other, in an obvious and pandering way much more reminiscent of his experience-light academic peers, who have mostly now all fallen away into rightful obscurity. And by the way, sheesh, no wonder the Chicago Tribune ended up trashing nearly all of Algren's books when they first came out, because Algren does a real number on them here in his first novel, essentially accusing them of being the FOX News of the 1930s, not only one of the major causes of the Great Depression but also one of the groups helping to perpetuate it, so that the paper's executives can get even more filthy-rich than they were before. No wonder the paper held a grudge against Algren for nearly his entire career, and no wonder that people call it such bitter irony that the Tribune now hands out a prestigious annual literary award in his name.
It's for all these reasons that Somebody in Boots was met with a resounding "meh" when first coming out, and by the end of a year had still sold less than 800 copies nationally; not exactly a shameful showing for a debut novel by a 26-year-old in the middle of the Great Depression, and especially considering the actual good press it ended up racking up (including a fairly glowing review in the New York Times), but certainly a disappointment for this man nearing thirty and still living part-time with his parents, whose friends had been spending months falsely inflating the book's expectations, with all of them convinced that it was destined to be a controversial bestseller that would turn Algren into a household name. And it's for all these reasons that Algren not only put off writing another book for a full half a decade, but that a couple of years after Boots he was quietly hospitalized for a short time, for what seems now to have been a nervous breakdown, all records of which he thoroughly suppressed later in life, because of his general embarrassment over this entire period of his career. (In fact, Algren was to have contentious feelings about Boots for the entire rest of his life, actively refusing to speak about it at all for decades, then finally in his later years coming to see it as a noble but deeply flawed failure.) But I'll be getting a lot more into all this next week, when I tackle his much more successful follow-up, 1942's Never Come Morning, considered by his fans to be the first of his "classics." I hope you'll have a chance to join me again then.
P.S. And a piece of trivia to leave you with today, that I never found a good place for in the actual essay: Turns out that Algren's original title for the novel was Native Son, but was nixed by the publisher, because of a California politician at the time running a campaign with this same theme; it would of course later be taken by Algren's drinking buddy Richard Wright for the most famous book of his own career. Its current title Somebody in Boots comes from a great line from within the novel, where Cass reflects that there's really only two major kinds of people in the world (his words) -- those who own sh-tkicker boots, and those always getting the sh-t kicked out of them.
[Photo purposely missing:]
The shot you're looking at above is of the Chicago street address 4834 North Troy, in the Albany Park neighborhood on the city's northwest side, a crucial location for any serious discussion regarding Nelson Algren; for it was here that Algren was to live full-time from the age of twelve until the start of college, and then part-time on and off after that all the way to nearly thirty. As you can see, as of 2009 the neighborhood has become a "creative class" one, full of web designers and ad-agency execs and all kinds of other shiny happy white-collar Loop workers, but this was not always the case; back when Algren was there in the 1920s and '30s, for example, it was mostly a working-class neighborhood, full of such blue-collar immigrants as Germans and Poles, with income levels that spanned from medium to low instead of medium to high like is the case now. And this is in fact yet another important thing to know about Algren early into any examination of his life and work; that according to Bettina Drew in her 1989 biography Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side, far from picking up the habit as an earnest liberal undergraduate, as is the case with so many writers who end up "championing the downtrodden," Algren just naturally preferred the company of the lowest-end citizens of his neighborhood even as a boy, from what seems to be simply a high natural curiosity about the world almost from birth, and an inherent disdain for the normal and blase.
It's an important thing to remember, because it's a big factor behind Algren's early successes; because as he traversed his early twenties (and history's 1920s) as a college student at the University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana, he of course fell in more and more with the growing group of young, radically liberal artists who defined the Early Modernist era, most of them squeaky-clean middle-classers with an intense desire to show off the plight of society's worst-off, but who had never actually hung out with a prostitute or stepped into a gambling hall to save their lives. Algren however was not only a regular at such haunts already, but was an intimate acquaintance of many of those whose lives revolved around such dens of iniquity, the people who Karl Marx called the "lumpen-proletariat" in The Communist Manifesto (a sort of holy bible to this group of young leftists of the 1920s and '30s); not the usual working-class but the lowest of the low, the cripples and addicts and mentally-challenged who lack even the basic faculties to become productive members of society, who in pre-Roosevelt America were essentially left to wither and die on their own, the very people that communism was theoretically designed to most help.
In fact, like it seems with so many Early Modernist artists, Algren ended up having quite an adventurous young life before becoming a full-time writer, one that kept him in close contact with the very people he would end up building his award-winning stories around. A sober and hard-working student of journalism, French and sociology at Champaign, he ended up rushing through his degree so to be able to get a job in the lucrative "Roaring Twenties" that much faster; but then he ended up graduating right at the start of the Great Depression in the early '30s, the holder of a now worthless degree who found himself in the same soup lines as everyone else. It was at this point, Drew says, that Algren spent several years actually living the full-time life of a "hobo," which to modern ears might need a bit of a clarification; because far from being small bunches of panhandling stragglers like we think of the homeless today, in the Great Depression hoboes were an entire economic class, hundreds of thousands of young people who simply roamed the countryside from day to day looking for whatever temporary labor they could find, crisscrossing the US once or twice every single month through the dangerous activity of "train-hopping," not the romantic notion we think of it today but rather a perilous and highly illegal endeavor that always carried the chance of violent injury and death.
It was during these years that Algren saw with his own eyes the kind of human indignities that his peers only read about; of young women having miscarriages in freight cars and then bleeding to death, of young boys trying to hop a rail, missing, and getting their legs cleanly chopped off by the rushing wheels. And when Algren got busted once in 1934 for stealing a typewriter from a half-empty community college in small-town Texas, the month he spent in a county jail awaiting trial was what he considered ever after as one of the most harrowing of his life, and gave him direct knowledge of the pre-civil-rights squalor, 'convict justice,' and complex homoerotic/homophobic sexual politics that were a part of the American prison system even then. So no wonder, then, when he finally got settled for a time again in Chicago, and started getting more and more involved with the local chapter of the John Reed Society (a formal network of communist-sympathizing urban intellectuals in the pre-McCarthy US), it was Algren who was most admired among his new circle of friends (including famed black author Richard Wright) for bringing such a high level of authenticity and attention to detail to his work, in a way that his ivory-towered peers simply couldn't.
It was at this point, in fact, that Algren's career finally started taking off, after almost a decade of on-and-off writing in a more traditional vein; spurred by his Reed friends' insistence that he write more about his true experiences as a 'bo, his melodramatic stories of Man Dispossessed started quickly striking a chord within the exact crowd of leftist intellectuals who were desperately seeking such stories. It was one of these tales, in fact -- "So Help Me," based on the real experience of Algren and two of his drifter pals once trying to re-open an abandoned gas station in the Deep South -- that brought him to the attention of Vanguard Press in New York, who supposedly sent him a simple query letter one day seeing if he just happened to be working on a full-length novel; claiming years later that he simply had nothing better to do, he ended up hopping a freight-train to New York that very week, and by the end of the visit had finagled Vanguard into a book contract, with them agreeing to front the money for him to live cheaply in Texas again for another three months, and with him promising to deliver a full manuscript at the end. In true artistic fashion, he missed that first deadline, although finally did deliver on the book; and that's how it is that we have Algren's 1935 debut novel, Somebody in Boots, which both he and his commie friends were convinced was going to make him known as "the American Gorky," and help usher in a glorious new revolution in Modernist political thought.
But there turned out to be a problem with Boots, succinctly summed up by fellow writer (and secretly-brought-on editor) James Farrell; namely, it was a barely readable mess, and destined in its original form to cause embarrassment to nearly everyone associated with it. And sure, maybe Farrell wasn't exactly the best person to be making such an assessment objectively -- although a fellow communist sympathizer, he couldn't stand what he called the simplified preaching of the "Proletariat Novel," and in fact didn't hold at all with the Stalinist idea of all artistic projects somehow needing to serve the state, a position that Reedites agreed with quite strongly. But then again, maybe this made Farrell exactly the most perfect person to come on as secret editor; because as we all know by now, no matter how noble the intentions, a book simply needs to touch something profound within the general zeitgeist in order to be a big success, and with the majority of American citizens at that time much more like Farrell than Algren himself, left-leaning but not radical and certainly in no mood for a violent revolution.
Now that I've read the book myself, in fact, I can easily see what people complained about when it first came out, and can perfectly understand the mixture of respect and frustration for the novel among those who take their Modernist literature seriously. It's ultimately the story of one Cass McKay, not an autobiographical portrait of Algren himself but rather of one of the typical "lumpens" he spent time with back then -- barely intelligent, quick to anger and with a bad taste for whiskey, he seems almost born to live the hobo lifestyle, the product of an abusive home and with almost no formal education under his belt. The novel itself, then, is a 260-page record of life taking a nearly continuous dump on Cass as he stumbles his way through the Great Depression (known among the 'boes as "the Big Trouble"), which like I said is mostly made up of experiences Algren actually had during his own drifter years; by the time our story is over, not only have all the real events I've already mentioned taken place to the fictional Cass, but also the gang-rape of a young black woman traveling by herself, the unwanted turning of Cass's sister into a prostitute, the forced feeding of rancid meat to hundreds of vagrants by a corrupt do-gooder church receiving New Deal government money, the horrific death of a prisoner from untreated tuberculosis, and all kinds of other wonderful life-affirming experiences like these.
It's when Algren gets lost inside these stories that he really cooks, when he forgets about Making A Grand Point and simply describes in exquisite, poetic detail what the experiences were actually like -- take for example his masterful description of a low-class burlesque house in Chicago's South Loop that Cass ends up working at for awhile, which I swear to God by the end made me feel like I had actually visited it in real life myself -- and in fact Algren himself came to understand more and more that this is where his true strength as a writer laid, honing this aspect to razor sharpness in such later masterpieces as The Man with the Golden Arm. But unfortunately, the highly political 25-year-old Algren did feel the need in his first novel to Make A Grand Point, and it is always at these overwritten, overanalyzed moments that the book most suffers; take for example his bad habit of writing accented regional dialogue phonetically, which threatens to make the novel utterly unreadable during several long stretches. (Confused by what I'm talking about? Take this random example: "Well, y'all see, when ah fight a man ah just go all-to-pieces like, so sometime it happen ah don' rightly know ex-acly what is it ah hev got in mah han'." UGH.)
And of course it doesn't help that each section of the novel starts with a highly intellectual quote from The Communist Manifesto itself, a jarring schism from the plain-spoken social-realist tone of the actual book; and it also doesn't help that the entire last 50 pages essentially becomes one big lefty sermon, with Algren using Chicago's real 1932 World's Fair (unfortunately planned when times were good, but not open until after the Great Depression hit) as a heavy-handed metaphor for class inequality, comparing the glittering lights on one side of the fairground fence with the trash-picking street orphans on the other, in an obvious and pandering way much more reminiscent of his experience-light academic peers, who have mostly now all fallen away into rightful obscurity. And by the way, sheesh, no wonder the Chicago Tribune ended up trashing nearly all of Algren's books when they first came out, because Algren does a real number on them here in his first novel, essentially accusing them of being the FOX News of the 1930s, not only one of the major causes of the Great Depression but also one of the groups helping to perpetuate it, so that the paper's executives can get even more filthy-rich than they were before. No wonder the paper held a grudge against Algren for nearly his entire career, and no wonder that people call it such bitter irony that the Tribune now hands out a prestigious annual literary award in his name.
It's for all these reasons that Somebody in Boots was met with a resounding "meh" when first coming out, and by the end of a year had still sold less than 800 copies nationally; not exactly a shameful showing for a debut novel by a 26-year-old in the middle of the Great Depression, and especially considering the actual good press it ended up racking up (including a fairly glowing review in the New York Times), but certainly a disappointment for this man nearing thirty and still living part-time with his parents, whose friends had been spending months falsely inflating the book's expectations, with all of them convinced that it was destined to be a controversial bestseller that would turn Algren into a household name. And it's for all these reasons that Algren not only put off writing another book for a full half a decade, but that a couple of years after Boots he was quietly hospitalized for a short time, for what seems now to have been a nervous breakdown, all records of which he thoroughly suppressed later in life, because of his general embarrassment over this entire period of his career. (In fact, Algren was to have contentious feelings about Boots for the entire rest of his life, actively refusing to speak about it at all for decades, then finally in his later years coming to see it as a noble but deeply flawed failure.) But I'll be getting a lot more into all this next week, when I tackle his much more successful follow-up, 1942's Never Come Morning, considered by his fans to be the first of his "classics." I hope you'll have a chance to join me again then.
P.S. And a piece of trivia to leave you with today, that I never found a good place for in the actual essay: Turns out that Algren's original title for the novel was Native Son, but was nixed by the publisher, because of a California politician at the time running a campaign with this same theme; it would of course later be taken by Algren's drinking buddy Richard Wright for the most famous book of his own career. Its current title Somebody in Boots comes from a great line from within the novel, where Cass reflects that there's really only two major kinds of people in the world (his words) -- those who own sh-tkicker boots, and those always getting the sh-t kicked out of them.
January 22, 2022
The blurb on the back says that this is a disturbingly important book, relevant for the 80s.
Well, what about now? With tent cities all over the place in my city and others. The five stars are not only for the command the author has while writing about human sadness, human despair, but for the extremely important message about the people that do the work of chaos in this world.
Goodreads tells me that I read this in 2018; that I gave it a two-star rating, and that I wrote no review. 🤷♂️
"He had learned that for him, cass mckay, there was no escape from brutality. He had learned that, for him, there was no Asylum from evil or pain or long loneliness. It might be that for others there was something different; but for him lonely pain and lonely evil were all that there was in the whole wide world. The world was a cruel place, all men went alone in it. Each man went alone, no two went together. Those who were strong beat those who were weak. They who said they loved Jesus wore little spiked boots, and those who kept silent ran swiftly away. There was only one god, and he was a devil; he was everything that there was in the world, for he was all pain and all evil. he was all that was secret and dark and unclean. There were only two kinds of men wherever you went - the men who wore boots, and the men who ran. You must not try to take that which belong to another unless you were strong enough to keep it when that other found out. Otherwise you would be kicked into a jailhouse. If you could get much you were strong and therefore good; God gave to the strong and took from the weak. He was on the side of the ones who rode in autos, who lived in white houses: he was as big as county sheriff schultz, as rich as judge bankhead from presidio, pious as the Reverend Benjamin Cody, and fierce as the Rancher Boone terry."
Cass and his friend Johnny look to steal some fuel from the Rancher Boone Terry, the richest man around. They are freezing in their homes, so they are desperate. they are looking for wood, but the wood is tied down tight and, unable to get any out, they look instead to steal some kerosene from drums. This does not go well:
"his song was lost around the corner of the iglesia metodista; they returned to their task and in a few minutes the hole was completed; when cass put an eye to the opening he saw that the barrel was full to its brim. In the night air the stuff was almost odorless. The boys took a firm hold and heaved together again - and when they got it lying flat on its side on the earth, like a beer keg on a bar, the cover came off. It had been loosened by their chiseling and forced by the sudden upsurge behind it. In the flood-freshet that followed both boys were drenched. they were bending over aligning the cans in front of the barrel when it burst like a brief tidal wave over their heads, smashed down the cans and set them to floating, spread over the ground and flowed under the fence - made Islands out of groundswells and small lakes out of ruts."
When cass is running with a gang of hoboes, one of them is a young black woman, dressed like a man. This is a horrifying, wholly racist scene:
" ' nervy black heifer,' olin Jones grumbled. 'they're whores every time. Why don't he push her black puss in anyhow? They all yell some, but don't believe that, they like white boys to do 'em that way. That's what they're for, y'know.'
Then he laughed lowly, a faint half-laugh: they all had to laugh then at what they saw. Burrus, with his side turned toward them, was urinating on the girl's overall; when she stepped back he followed. And when she could go no further back, because of the mesquite behind her, she screamed and struck out at him. He caught one arm and imprisoned it, laughing, but her teeth found his wrist and his laughter broke – 'Oooooo'-- he yelped like a lashed pup – 'Oooooo, now I will git yo' fer real.'
He advanced slowly, the girl's voice Rose to frenzy.
'white! white! Mah Joe you burnt!'
she came forward like an outraged cat, and her fingernails screeled deeply down his face. In a panic of surprise and pain, he recaptured her arm and twisted until she screamed darkly, like a cat with its throat cut trying to scream. Twisting thus slowly and using both of his hands, and engaged by the feel of blood on his cheeks and encouraged by sharp Cries behind him, he forced the girl to her knees and to Earth. He was not quite strong enough, however: though he pinned her arms deep in sod and kneeled hard on her breasts, yet she writhed so that he could no longer control her. Had olin Jones not run up swiftly, still feigning faint laughter, she would have escaped them all. Jones squatted heavily down on her legs in the very moment when it seemed she was finally free; holding her firmly with one hand, with his other he ripped her overalls down the middle. Laughing faintly."
What follows is a horrifying gang-rape scene, filling me with horror to read what I know is not only written in fiction, but it's true and happens in real life.
In chicago, on the shores of the lake, is where humanity gathers. Cass, and the woman he is with for a short time, Norah, join them:
" outside the window lay the city, basking under sun or sleeping through the summer night. Down to the oak Street beach the Italians took their children. Cass and Norah followed them down and slept in each other's arms on the shore.
This was the tragic meeting place of men, the brief City sprung out of the prairie and falling again into dust. This was the gathering ground between the years, here humans bred for an hour and died. Some of these in this place wore pants, others wore dresses. Some here were Hairy and some were hairless, and all went down to the beach together, talking, beneath great stars, in a tongue 10 million years younger than their brains. Thus the eons of spawning in the teeth of decay, 10 million years of defeat and lusting, war and disease and conquest, had at last brought them Gabbing into this place. they would eat pink popcorn balls here, have dreams at night, ride streetcars a while, and die, and decay; and call the dreaming living, and call the decay death. Mingled with the sand of the oak Street beach was the dust of men who had bathed in the lake 10,000 years before Eric the Red. And cass McKay sat upon the sand, a skinny man in a blue bathrobe, reading true romance."
What a reflection/commentary on the insufficiency, the very insignificance of humans.
Well, what about now? With tent cities all over the place in my city and others. The five stars are not only for the command the author has while writing about human sadness, human despair, but for the extremely important message about the people that do the work of chaos in this world.
Goodreads tells me that I read this in 2018; that I gave it a two-star rating, and that I wrote no review. 🤷♂️
"He had learned that for him, cass mckay, there was no escape from brutality. He had learned that, for him, there was no Asylum from evil or pain or long loneliness. It might be that for others there was something different; but for him lonely pain and lonely evil were all that there was in the whole wide world. The world was a cruel place, all men went alone in it. Each man went alone, no two went together. Those who were strong beat those who were weak. They who said they loved Jesus wore little spiked boots, and those who kept silent ran swiftly away. There was only one god, and he was a devil; he was everything that there was in the world, for he was all pain and all evil. he was all that was secret and dark and unclean. There were only two kinds of men wherever you went - the men who wore boots, and the men who ran. You must not try to take that which belong to another unless you were strong enough to keep it when that other found out. Otherwise you would be kicked into a jailhouse. If you could get much you were strong and therefore good; God gave to the strong and took from the weak. He was on the side of the ones who rode in autos, who lived in white houses: he was as big as county sheriff schultz, as rich as judge bankhead from presidio, pious as the Reverend Benjamin Cody, and fierce as the Rancher Boone terry."
Cass and his friend Johnny look to steal some fuel from the Rancher Boone Terry, the richest man around. They are freezing in their homes, so they are desperate. they are looking for wood, but the wood is tied down tight and, unable to get any out, they look instead to steal some kerosene from drums. This does not go well:
"his song was lost around the corner of the iglesia metodista; they returned to their task and in a few minutes the hole was completed; when cass put an eye to the opening he saw that the barrel was full to its brim. In the night air the stuff was almost odorless. The boys took a firm hold and heaved together again - and when they got it lying flat on its side on the earth, like a beer keg on a bar, the cover came off. It had been loosened by their chiseling and forced by the sudden upsurge behind it. In the flood-freshet that followed both boys were drenched. they were bending over aligning the cans in front of the barrel when it burst like a brief tidal wave over their heads, smashed down the cans and set them to floating, spread over the ground and flowed under the fence - made Islands out of groundswells and small lakes out of ruts."
When cass is running with a gang of hoboes, one of them is a young black woman, dressed like a man. This is a horrifying, wholly racist scene:
" ' nervy black heifer,' olin Jones grumbled. 'they're whores every time. Why don't he push her black puss in anyhow? They all yell some, but don't believe that, they like white boys to do 'em that way. That's what they're for, y'know.'
Then he laughed lowly, a faint half-laugh: they all had to laugh then at what they saw. Burrus, with his side turned toward them, was urinating on the girl's overall; when she stepped back he followed. And when she could go no further back, because of the mesquite behind her, she screamed and struck out at him. He caught one arm and imprisoned it, laughing, but her teeth found his wrist and his laughter broke – 'Oooooo'-- he yelped like a lashed pup – 'Oooooo, now I will git yo' fer real.'
He advanced slowly, the girl's voice Rose to frenzy.
'white! white! Mah Joe you burnt!'
she came forward like an outraged cat, and her fingernails screeled deeply down his face. In a panic of surprise and pain, he recaptured her arm and twisted until she screamed darkly, like a cat with its throat cut trying to scream. Twisting thus slowly and using both of his hands, and engaged by the feel of blood on his cheeks and encouraged by sharp Cries behind him, he forced the girl to her knees and to Earth. He was not quite strong enough, however: though he pinned her arms deep in sod and kneeled hard on her breasts, yet she writhed so that he could no longer control her. Had olin Jones not run up swiftly, still feigning faint laughter, she would have escaped them all. Jones squatted heavily down on her legs in the very moment when it seemed she was finally free; holding her firmly with one hand, with his other he ripped her overalls down the middle. Laughing faintly."
What follows is a horrifying gang-rape scene, filling me with horror to read what I know is not only written in fiction, but it's true and happens in real life.
In chicago, on the shores of the lake, is where humanity gathers. Cass, and the woman he is with for a short time, Norah, join them:
" outside the window lay the city, basking under sun or sleeping through the summer night. Down to the oak Street beach the Italians took their children. Cass and Norah followed them down and slept in each other's arms on the shore.
This was the tragic meeting place of men, the brief City sprung out of the prairie and falling again into dust. This was the gathering ground between the years, here humans bred for an hour and died. Some of these in this place wore pants, others wore dresses. Some here were Hairy and some were hairless, and all went down to the beach together, talking, beneath great stars, in a tongue 10 million years younger than their brains. Thus the eons of spawning in the teeth of decay, 10 million years of defeat and lusting, war and disease and conquest, had at last brought them Gabbing into this place. they would eat pink popcorn balls here, have dreams at night, ride streetcars a while, and die, and decay; and call the dreaming living, and call the decay death. Mingled with the sand of the oak Street beach was the dust of men who had bathed in the lake 10,000 years before Eric the Red. And cass McKay sat upon the sand, a skinny man in a blue bathrobe, reading true romance."
What a reflection/commentary on the insufficiency, the very insignificance of humans.
July 5, 2019
I enjoy Algren's prose. Perhaps I am too sentimental to fully relish this book, however. I couldn't read it for long sessions--it was unpleasant and sad. But I kept coming back to it and I am thankful for the detailed view of the depression era realism--albeit expressing some less-than-inspiring workers propaganda. Chicago was/is a great city. Algren made it clear throughout his life the dichotomy of it: the culture and community versus the corruption and violence. The latter is well represented in this novel, but the former is unseen. Part of that is due to the simplicity of Cass, and the focus on the underclass of the city. But I miss the roundness of the town and a depiction of Chicago that is gritty enough, sure, but at the same time reveals its simple pleasures: the phenomenal thunderstorms over and at the edge of the lake, the to-the-marrow chill of the winter wind--that can take your breath away, the smells of cooking in the air--each neighborhood with different flavors. With the stockyards of that era, there was a lot of meat available even if Cass and Norah could afford only scraps. Algren's Chicago in [i]Somebody in Boots[/i] is a gilded-age city, overcrowded with the poor masses rising up. The city doesn't have character enough for me. And so, because Cass can't see the dynamic Chicago, I don't feel much for his conditions.
There is unevenness (Algren's words) in the novel: Algren's sensitivity for Norah--enough to set up her character via a compressed backstory--stands out for the consequences she pays in the end. It's a bit contrived.
However, overall I like Algren's writing. There is humor underneath his grim depiction of the conditions that reveal repugnant men. He drew me in, and as much as I often just had to close the book and take a break from Algren's depressing world (reading in small sips), I kept returning to enjoy his sharp-eyed view of a desperate man in a revolutionary time.
There is unevenness (Algren's words) in the novel: Algren's sensitivity for Norah--enough to set up her character via a compressed backstory--stands out for the consequences she pays in the end. It's a bit contrived.
However, overall I like Algren's writing. There is humor underneath his grim depiction of the conditions that reveal repugnant men. He drew me in, and as much as I often just had to close the book and take a break from Algren's depressing world (reading in small sips), I kept returning to enjoy his sharp-eyed view of a desperate man in a revolutionary time.
January 12, 2025
Algren himself was not keen on his first novel published in 1935 dismissing it as primitive and politically naive which is valid but nonetheless, it has a raw energy, and as Hemmingway said "Do not read Somebody in Boots if you cannot take a punch".
March 20, 2024
Algren's assessment of this book 30 years after its publication.
For me this book is flawless. It's one of my top reading experiences.
Algren humanizes a hyper ordinary lead, Cass. He paints a less than flattering picture of this character (ugly, coward, conformist, racist, misogynist, aimless, dim, unaware, boastful), and reinforces his weaknesses at every opportunity. There is no buffer of noir coolness or irony or grimy glamour to soften Cass's unlikability.
The beauty of this narrative is that I came to feel very invested in Cass's fate. Algren manages to make Cass a very engaging character without applying any filters of remarkability to him. Neither his mundanity nor his faults are fetishized.
Every character sketch is strictly human, and even though this is a very opinionated and political piece of literature, his characters do not carry the burden of black and white morality. He lets these characters live out their narrative lives in the most organic and natural manner. The only factor that Algren tightly controls is the canvas and the world these characters inhabit. The narrative world offers stimuli, and the characters react organically. Not one scene felt staged. The book doesn't feel didactic.
The prose style is very unique and a thing unto itself.
Stunning!
This is an uneven novel written by an uneven man in the most uneven of American times.
For me this book is flawless. It's one of my top reading experiences.
Algren humanizes a hyper ordinary lead, Cass. He paints a less than flattering picture of this character (ugly, coward, conformist, racist, misogynist, aimless, dim, unaware, boastful), and reinforces his weaknesses at every opportunity. There is no buffer of noir coolness or irony or grimy glamour to soften Cass's unlikability.
The beauty of this narrative is that I came to feel very invested in Cass's fate. Algren manages to make Cass a very engaging character without applying any filters of remarkability to him. Neither his mundanity nor his faults are fetishized.
Every character sketch is strictly human, and even though this is a very opinionated and political piece of literature, his characters do not carry the burden of black and white morality. He lets these characters live out their narrative lives in the most organic and natural manner. The only factor that Algren tightly controls is the canvas and the world these characters inhabit. The narrative world offers stimuli, and the characters react organically. Not one scene felt staged. The book doesn't feel didactic.
The prose style is very unique and a thing unto itself.
Stunning!
September 4, 2021
Completely different than the rest of Algren's writing, but just as great; this is far more brutal and simply written, almost coming off a bit to heavy-handed at times. Nonetheless, this is a fantastic portrait of Depression-era America, told by someone all to aware of its hardships.
Side note: this particular edition is one of the most poorly-edited books I've read in quite a while. Typos abound.
Side note: this particular edition is one of the most poorly-edited books I've read in quite a while. Typos abound.
May 23, 2009
Reminds me of Cormac McCarthy (or is it the other way around). His portrayal of casual violence suggests the horror one should feel but his characters clearly do not. I was amused by his portrayal of the world exhibition, it sounds quite similar to the language being used by daley and the trib(ute/une) to promote the olympics today.
February 4, 2008
I read this book 1 year before I went cross country by train right after college. Half the trip I kept thinking of Cass McCay and the other half of Algren.... I was the same age as he was when he wrote it....
Read
July 8, 2011violent, painful, scary. at first i just wished he'd written a novel more like the preface. but i came to see it as a warning and reminder of how bad things can be, and what pathways might offer hope. (hint: not capitalism)
May 13, 2021
Algren's solid 1st novel that barely sold. Its failure caused Algren to suck on a gas pipe out of despair. He would revisit & improve on these themes and use similar characters in later novels.
October 22, 2024
Algren's assessment of this book 30 years after its publication.
For me this book is flawless. It's one of my top reading experiences.
Algren humanizes a hyper ordinary lead, Cass. He paints a less than flattering picture of this character (ugly, coward, conformist, racist, misogynist, aimless, dim, unaware, boastful), and reinforces his weaknesses at every opportunity. There is no buffer of noir coolness or irony or grimy glamour to soften Cass's unlikability.
The beauty of this narrative is that I came to feel very invested in Cass's fate. Algren manages to make Cass a very engaging character without applying any filters of remarkability to him. Neither his mundanity nor his faults are fetishized.
Every character sketch is strictly human, and even though this is a very opinionated and political piece of literature, his characters do not carry the burden of black and white morality. He lets these characters live out their narrative lives in the most organic and natural manner. The only factor that Algren tightly controls is the canvas and the world these characters inhabit. The narrative world offers stimuli, and the characters react organically. Not one scene felt staged. The book doesn't feel didactic.
The prose style is very unique and a thing unto itself.
Stunning!
This is an uneven novel written by an uneven man in the most uneven of American times.
For me this book is flawless. It's one of my top reading experiences.
Algren humanizes a hyper ordinary lead, Cass. He paints a less than flattering picture of this character (ugly, coward, conformist, racist, misogynist, aimless, dim, unaware, boastful), and reinforces his weaknesses at every opportunity. There is no buffer of noir coolness or irony or grimy glamour to soften Cass's unlikability.
The beauty of this narrative is that I came to feel very invested in Cass's fate. Algren manages to make Cass a very engaging character without applying any filters of remarkability to him. Neither his mundanity nor his faults are fetishized.
Every character sketch is strictly human, and even though this is a very opinionated and political piece of literature, his characters do not carry the burden of black and white morality. He lets these characters live out their narrative lives in the most organic and natural manner. The only factor that Algren tightly controls is the canvas and the world these characters inhabit. The narrative world offers stimuli, and the characters react organically. Not one scene felt staged. The book doesn't feel didactic.
The prose style is very unique and a thing unto itself.
Stunning!
May 13, 2024
After reading "The Man with the Golden Arm", I wanted more by this author. This novel was his first book, although he had published short stories. It was in large part autobiography. It captured the time of the Great Depression while he was a youth and then into young adulthood. It's bleak and a wonder he survived.
June 24, 2025
Misery after misery after misery and I should've loved it but the writing is awful. It was his first novel so hopefully his later books are written in a less "...just left college and I really want to be taken seriously..." style.
January 24, 2021
3.5/4 stars.
Read
October 19, 2020Read too long ago to give a meaningful rating
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