The Wild Party: The Lost Classic by Joseph Moncure March - Hardcover

Spiegelman, Art

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679424504 ISBN 13: 9780679424505

Publisher: Pantheon, 1994

Synopsis

When first published in 1928, this story of one night of debauchery in the life of a vaudeville dancer became a "scandalous" success. The Wild Party is now given new life and expression, with March's text accompanied by more than 75 remarkable drawings by Art Spiegelman.

About this title

About the Author

Joseph Moncure March was a poet, journalist and screenwriter best known for his two verse narratives, The Wild Party and The Set-Up, the story of a washed-up black boxer. An editor for The New Yorker in the 1920s, he died in 1977.

Art Spiegelman is the author of Maus, A Survivor's Tale, for which he received a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992. He was co-founder and editor of Raw, the acclaimed magazine
of avant-garde comics, and is currently a staff artist for The New Yorker and comix editor at Details magazine. He is currently working on Crime Doesn't Pay, an opera libretto about the history of comics. He lives in New York City with his wife, Françoise Mouly, and their two children, Nadja and Dashiell.
From the Trade Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

A lost "classic"? It's odd how strikingly some writing may date to an era yet can later be resuscitated because of its potential for art and camp, and thus gain a new audience. That's what Spiegelman (Maus I and II) has pulled off here by rediscovering and illustrating this jazzy, insistently rhyming roaring '20s period poem, banned in Boston when first published in 1928. What Spiegelman, in his introduction, calls his "fetishistic" pleasure in the poem, penned by the New Yorker's inaugural managing editor, is borne out by March's dither of hard-edged rhythms recounting the boozing, brawling and fractious lovemaking of an all-night party ending in a murder. The characters are hard-boiled and needy-and stereotypically presented. The women, especially, seem deliberately one-dimensional, even offensively so-if one is inclined to take offense at all. But the poem works as a bouncy artifact, and the black-and-white illustrations are appropriately, viscerally graphic, summoning up the sense of a knockabout urban spree with debonair zeal and well-appointed crudeness.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0679424504
• ISBN 13: 9780679424505
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 110