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

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.