Bottom Dogs

Dahlberg's first novel, written in 1928 and published in 1930, is the story of Lorry Lewis, of Kansas City, Missouri, whose mother sent him to an orphanage in Cleveland when he was eleven. Lorry eventually winds up riding the freights across the West to Portland, and then down to Los Angeles, having many sordid encounters along the way. Somewhere between the cold naturalism of Frank Norris and the urgent spontaneity of Jack Kerouac, the book is often classified as a proletarian novel. It gives a peek into the seamy side of life in the U.S. in the late 1920s. D. H. Lawrence wrote a strange and interesting 10-page introduction, which begins: "When we think of America, and of her huge success, we never realize how many failures have gone, and still go to build up that success. It is not till you live in America, and go a little under the surface, that you begin to see how terrible and brutal is the mass of failure that nourishes the roots of the gigantic tree of dollars." And he ends by saying, "I don't want to read any more books like this. But I am glad to have read this one, just to know what is the last word in repulsive consciousness, consciousness in a state of repulsion. It helps one to understand the world, and saves one the necessity of having to follow out the phenomenon of physical repulsion any further, for the time being."