โ Scribed by Willeford, Charles
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
First published as an unheralded paperback original, Pick-Up is an authentic underground classic, an explosive bulletin from the urban underbelly of mid-1950s America. It was Charles Willeford's second novel, after a rough and wandering earlier life that had taken him from Depression-era hobo camps and soup kitchens to wartime battlefields. The unblinking story of two lost and self-destructive drifters--a failed painter working as a counterman in a cheap diner and a woman in flight from domestic violence--trying to find a place for themselves in the back streets of San Francisco, Pick-Up is hardboiled writing at its nihilistic best: Willeford's preferred title for the book was Until I Am Dead. Its bleak vision of life beyond the edge is haunted by rape, racism, alcoholism, suicide, and inescapable poverty, yet shot through with a tenderness and compassion sustained against all odds in a society offering few breaks to its outcasts and misfits....
๐ SIMILAR VOLUMES
In Pick-Up, Charles Willeford has created a work of psychological suspense that is at once poignant, terrifying, and utterly authentic in its depcition of alcoholic desire and destruction.
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