Overview

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby still captivates readers with its vision of 1920s New York as a city of infinite potential, where ambition and defeat live hand in hand. This sentiment is captured, with even greater acuity, in the pages of Aben Kandel's nearly forgotten masterpiece of urban life, City for Conquest (1936). The source of the classic 1940s James Cagney film of the same name, this panoramic New York novel captures the complex patterns of city life, vividly evoking a metropolis of dreams and nightmares. Kandel portrays a volatile city inhabited by the aristocrat, the criminal, the idealist, the bohemian, the driven, the entrapped, and the impoverished, all equally striving ""to make a dent in this town."" The city itself is booming, its new constructions callously built on destruction, supplanting with equal disdain the slums of Brooklyn and the farm fields of the Bronx. This feverish microcosm of humanity inhabits a world of immense inequality where ""six blocks from Wall Street, people haven't got a dime, six blocks from duplex apartments, people live in hovels"" and ""between the scarlet sore and the apple of the eye there lay a thick eyebrow of indifference."" A literary triumph in the tradition of Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer, and out of print for far too long, City for Conquest is the inaugural work of fiction in Transaction's new Lost Urban Classics series.

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9781412856065

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This is a reissue of a book . . . which is shortly to appear in pictures, and which deserves a wider market than it received in 1938. New York-- from the upper reaches of the Bronx, to the sordid tenements on Death Avenue and the river fronts, pitilessly exposed, in a succession of staccato episodes. Together they weave an intricate pattern of city life, pitched high, pitched low, in a wide range of social and economic scales. Does it get anywhere? Perhaps not, but the telling is vivid, poignant, searching, tragic. It is New York, at its worst rather than its best. --Kirkus Review

This is a reissue of a book . . . which is shortly to appear in pictures, and which deserves a wider market than it received in 1938. New York-- from the upper reaches of the Bronx, to the sordid tenements on Death Avenue and the river fronts, pitilessly exposed, in a succession of staccato episodes. Together they weave an intricate pattern of city life, pitched high, pitched low, in a wide range of social and economic scales. Does it get anywhere? Perhaps not, but the telling is vivid, poignant, searching, tragic. It is New York, at its worst rather than its best. </p> --<em>Kirkus Review</em></p>

Author Information

Aben Kandel was an American novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of Vaudeville, Black Sun, and Rabbi Burns. He was known for the screenplay I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Leonard Quart is professor emeritus of cinema at CUNY and COSI, contributing editor at Cineaste, and co-author of American Film and Society since 1945.

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