An Atlantic City Reader: The Rise and Decline of an American Resort

As Atlantic City grew to become one of the largest tourist destinations on the East Coast, it loomed ever larger in the imaginations of American writers. Generation upon generation of novelists, journalists, musicians, and poets visited Atlantic City and left with vivid impressions of its kaleidoscopic delights and its seedy underbelly.

This new reader collects all of these diverse perspectives on the city in one place, including accounts of Atlantic City by such famous visitors as Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Fanny Hurst, Arthur Conan Doyle, Damon Runyon, Langston Hughes, Elmore Leonard, and Bruce Springsteen. Arranged chronologically, the anthology traces the city’s history from its humble beginnings as a quiet health resort to its rapid ascent to the world’s playground, its gradual decline, and its hopeful if tenuous future. Together, the pieces in this collection take us inside the city’s glitz, glamor, and gambling palaces, but they also don’t shy away from its troubling histories of racial discrimination, political corruption, and urban decay. Compiling fiction, poetry, drama, memoirs, newspaper stories, and magazine reports, The Atlantic City Reader presents an engaging and multifaceted portrait of this iconic resort town. 

LOUIS J. PARASCANDOLA is a professor of English at Long Island University in Brooklyn, NY. He is the editor of several books, including J. A. Rogers: Selected Writingsand A Coney Island Reader (with John Parascandola).

JOHN PARASCANDOLA (1941-2024) taught at the University of Wisconsin – Madison before serving as chief of the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine and as Public Health Service Historian. His many books include Sex, Sin, and Science: A History of Syphilis in America (2008) and King of Poisons: A History of Arsenic (2012).