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 of its cars searching for hobos.
When the train pulled away, Nelson was stranded. It was October, and he was in the high desert. It would be cold when the sun set, so Nelson began walking along US 90. He had been on the road for three weeks and he hadn’t written a word.
That night Nelson reached a little Texas college town called Alpine and decided to stay. There was a boarding house on the outskirts of town. A woman named Nettleton owned it, and she offered Nelson a room the size of a cell, a bed, a dresser, a desk, and one meal a day for ten dollars a month. Nelson accepted. He unpacked his things—two shirts, one pair of pants, pads, pencils. Then he went to work.
Nelson wrote by hand beneath the harsh light of the single bare bulb hanging from his ceiling, and his method was documentary. He created a protagonist named Cass McKay, and led him along a narrative path that tracks the one Nelson traveled himself the year before—away from home, into New Orleans and then Texas, in and out of Relief Missions, through traumas. McKay’s world is a terror, and as he stumbles through it violence hardens him. A man slashes him with a knife outside a brothel. And he watches a freight burn and immolate the flock of sheep it had been carrying. He finds a child’s body by the side of the tracks. And he becomes hardened to other people’s pain.
Eventually Nelson approached the president of the local college and gained permission to use the school’s facilities. He began typing his manuscript on campus by day, and revising by hand at night. The little money he had was spent on tobacco and coffee; he scrounged meals from trash cans. Local aspiring writers sought Nelson out, and sometimes he sat down with them over coffee or Coca Cola to discuss his work. They paid rapt attention when he held forth about literature but he didn’t do so often. Mostly, he just wrote—day and night and day and night as the clock ticked down and his money ran low. “He worked like a dog,” one student said later.
Nelson maintained a frenzied pace for four months, but then the last installment of his advance arrived and he spent it. The book was only half-written. He had to return to Chicago so he could finish writing but he recoiled from the idea. His parents’ house was crowded with family members displaced by the Depression; everyone was out of work.
In late January, Nelson prepared to leave Alpine. He couldn’t delay his departure any longer. He sent some letters north, and said goodbye to the students he befriended. He penned a homesick poem—“All night one night I heard your voice, my city.” Then he walked up to the college campus.
It was late and dark when Nelson arrived, and he began testing doors. Eventually he found one that was unlocked. When he did, he opened it and entered an office. There was a desk inside, and on it there was a typewriter. Nelson sat down and plunked out a few lines of text on the machine. Then he picked it up and carried it off the campus and down the hill to his boarding house. When he reached his room he sealed the typewriter inside a crate. And in the morning he mailed it to his parents, charges reversed.
A freight train passed through Alpine before noon that day and Nelson hopped on board and rode north. It stopped after forty miles, and Nelson stepped off and began warming himself in the sun by the side of the tracks. That’s where the police found him. They asked his name. Then they took him into custody and brought him to Alpine where he confessed.
“A typewriter is the only means I had to complete a book which means either a few dollars or utter destitution,” Nelson told the sheriff. “There is nothing that is more vital to my mere existence as a typewriter, it is the only means I have to earn a living. If I write I can earn my own living.”
And then the sheriff locked Nelson inside the Brewster County Jail.
A week passed while Nelson waited for his trial, two, three—his deadline came and went and he began to stew. He watched the clouds through the barred windows of his cell. Sometimes he played checkers. He pictured his future and saw the state prison at Huntsville, a chain gang—the end of a career than never began. The other inmates beat him with belts, and he caught hives and they covered his body.
He wrote a letter to a friend. “I’m halfway to hell,” it read.
Nelson’s trial began in February. The proceedings started in the morning and they were finished by lunch. First the lawyers made their cases; then the jury left the room to deliberate.
The foreman returned quickly.
“We, the jury,” he began, “find the defendant guilty as charged in the indictment and for his punishment a confinement in the penitentiary for a term of two years.” The foreman paused. Then he continued speaking: “Furthermore, we recommend that the sentence be suspended during the good behavior of the defendant.”
The judge agreed, and Nelson was released—a felon, but a free man.
Nelson returned to Chicago after the trauma of his incarceration looking for allies and answers. A friend suggested he could find both at 1475 S. Michigan Ave. An arts organization called the John Reed Club met there—writers gathered in the group’s meeting room, and painters. They had their own magazine, Left Turn. And close ties with the Communist Party. Nelson said he would visit.
He found the Club on the second floor of a dingy building hard by the freight tracks on Chicago’s Near South Side. Murals covered the walls. Magazines published in the USSR were stacked on tables. And when people met to discuss literature or painting they didn’t worry over technique. Art was measured by only a single criterion at the club: Does it serve the revolution? Meetings ended with a group rendition of the “Internationale.”
Arise ye prisoners of starvation, members sang, Arise ye wretched of the earth.
Nelson was a star at the Club—one of the only members with a book in the works. And he became a regular. He attended Tuesday meetings that winter, and rabble rousing speeches. He even began making friends. Abraham Aaron was among the first. He was a young militant who had dropped out of college to help start the revolution. Richard Wright, a shy, moon-faced writer from Mississippi who had just published his first poems followed soon after. Then Nelson met a woman, and moved himself into her apartment.
For the next three seasons those were the corners of Nelson’s life—the Club and its politics, drinking coffee into the early morning hours with Aaron, debating revolutionary literature with Wright, and plugging away at his novel in his girlfriend’s apartment.
As Nelson worked, the new ideas he was being exposed to found their way into his book. His method changed. The observational, journalistic tone he employed in his early chapters faded, and anger seeped into text—politics, advocacy. Nelson wasn’t content to describe the predation he had seen on the road the way he imagined he would when he pitched his novel to James Henle. He wanted to diagnose causes now as well, and propose solutions.
Nelson revised and expanded his book, and as he did the violence and crushing despair his characters experience in
