Gangsters and Gold Diggers: Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway - Hardcover

Charyn, Jerome

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1568582781 ISBN 13: 9781568582788

Publisher: Da Capo Press, 2003

Synopsis

In this heady tribute to an unforgettable time and place, Jerome Charyn takes readers back to the golden era when Broadway the street became Broadway the legend. While Damon Runyon was the street's first chronicler, feting its good-guy gangsters and moxie'd molls, Charyn enlarges the story, capturing Broadway's vagabond nature, outlaw culture, and self-mythologizing. In prose both bombastic and cinematic, one of New York's quintessential contemporary writers brings a rollicking, rough-and-tumble time in the city's history to life, conjuring an intoxicating portrait of Jazz Age excess by examining the denizens of that greatest of all "staggering machine[s] of desire," Broadway. The stellar cast in this popular history includes Mae West, Fanny Brice, Legs Diamond, Irving Berlin, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and many more. 30 historic black-and-white photographs are featured.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

A legendary New York writer picks up where Gangs of New York left off and brings the guys and dolls of old Broadway to life...

Praise for Jerome Charyn:

"Charyn is a magician. He’s also sui generis. There isn’t another writer in America even remotely like him." —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

"Jerome Charyn has been recreating the absurdity, the frenzy and the menace of contemporary life, using wit and imagination and style to hold a threatening world at bay...a contemporary American Balzac." —New York Newsday

"Charyn has tamed his prose and makes it perform tricks. It’s a New York prose, street-smart, sly and full of lurches, like a series of subway stops on the way to hell." —New York Times

"The richest imagination in contemporary American letters." —Lawrence Block

"[Charyn’s] books constitute the highest kind of novelist art...absolutely unique among contemporary writers." —Los Angeles Times

About the Author:

Jerome Charyn was born in the Bronx in 1937 and is the author of more than thirty books, including The Isaac Quartet, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, and Metropolis: New York as Myth, Marketplace and Magical Land. He divides his time between New York and Paris.

About this edition

• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1568582781
• ISBN 13: 9781568582788
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256