Israel Zangwill (1864-1926) was an English-born humourist and writer. He dedicated his life to championing the cause of the oppressed. He wrote a very influential novel Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People (1892). The use of the metaphorical phrase melting pot to describe American absorption of immigrants was popularised by Zangwill's play The Melting-Pot, a hit in the United States in 1908-1909. He also wrote mystery works, such as The Big Bow Mystery (1892) and social satire such as The King of Schnorrers (1894). He was also involved in politics as an assimilationist, an early Zionist, a territorialist, a feminist and a pacifist. His other works include: Without Prejudice (1896), The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes (1903), Merely Mary Ann (1903) and The Forcing House (1922).
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Novelist, short story writer, and playwright Israel Zangwill (1864–1926) was a political activist and known as "the Dickens of the ghetto" for his stories of life in London's immigrant Jewish community. His play The Melting Pot gave rise to the metaphor of America as a crucible for the melding of nationalities.
Whodunit fans who prefer their murders mysteriously committed behind locked doors will appreciate this reissue of the first impossible crime novel, penned by the unlikely Zangwill (1864-1926)-better known during his lifetime as an ardent British Zionist-in the late 1890s. Widowed landlady Mrs. Drabdump and retired Scotland Yarder Grodman batter down a secured and bolted bedroom door to find Arthur Constant, a hero of the working classes, dead from a cut throat. After suicide is quickly ruled out, the puzzle captures the city's imagination, with theory after theory (some poking fun at Poe's solution to "The Murders in the Rue Morgue") floated in the press, until Grodman himself returns to the lists to try to clear the man condemned to death for the crime. The plot device has been used many times since, but Zangwill deserves credit for inventing it and enlisting it in an entertaining and timeless plot. With a sardonic style and vivid, Dickensian characterizations of Victoria-era London, Zangwill still appeals to contemporary readers.
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