Rough and Rowdy Ways

Times were tough in the thirties and tough guys chronicled the era in newspapers short stories and novels in prose that was terse hard-boiled bleak. One such writer was a Texan named Edward Anderson.Rough and Rowdy Ways is the story of Edward Anderson primarily in what were ironically his golden years—the Great Depression. The laconic loner hopped freights wrote two proletarian novels of the social underclass looked for inspiration in a shot glass and mixed with Hollywood celebrities while employed as a screenwriter for Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers.When the thirties ended the hard-times storytelling that was Anderson''s genius went out of style and his family suffered the effects of his rejection slips unemployment and alcoholism. Attracted to theoretical aspects of fascism anti-Semitism and Swedenborgianism Anderson became an eccentric unpopular among intellectuals as well as the poor folk whose plight he had sketched too well in prose. He died in Brownsville Texas in 1969 leaving a legacy of shattered relationships and two whole well-crafted novels of a distinctive literary genre and historical era