Product Description

" The Night Club Era should rate as a Broadway Koran. Other books on the subject are unnecessary if they agree with it, wrong if they differ from it, and in either case should be burned." -- Alva Johnston, from the Introduction

Written in the aftermath of Prohibition, Stanley Walker's The Night Club Era is a lively and idiosyncratic account of the people and places that defined New York's night life during the era of "the great American madness." Here we meet murderers and millionaires, gangsters, bartenders, celebrities of the stage, screen, and society, and a host of other colorful characters who populated the city's diverse night clubs, from El Fey to the Cotton Club. Walker relives the "night of incredulous sadness" on which the Volstead Act went into effect, visits a classic speakeasy, discussing the owner's delicate arrangements with policemen, prohibition agents, and bootleggers, and details the frequently brutal swindles practiced in the city's numerous clip joints and the tactics of the era's crime organizations, explaining precisely what happens when one is "taken for a ride." Among the larger-than-life night club habitués Walker sketches are Owney Madden, the elder statesman of the city's rackets; Walter Winchell, America's most influential columnist and the "brash historian of our life and times"; Mayor James J. Walker, who typified the gaudiness, smartness, and insouciance of the city he ran, yet was never too refined to shoot dice on hotel room floors; and Texas Guinan, the beloved entertainer, hostess, and entrepreneur who greeted customers with her trademark phrase "Hello, sucker!" Vividly told, The Night Club Era offers a singular, serious -- though never sober -- history of New York City during Prohibition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #272628 in Books
• Published on: 1999-08-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 344 pages

From Library Journal
As a writer for the old New York Herald Tribune in the 1920s and 1930s, Walker chronicled the city in words the way Weegee did with a Graflex. City Editor, from 1934, follows his own career at the Tribune as well as offering lessons in the ethics of journalism, freedom of the press, and the corporate influence on editorial. Written in 1933, The Night Club Era is Walker's portrait of the wicked city during Prohibition and how the banning of liquor gave rise to a new social setting in which, legal or not, booze flowed uninhibited and gangsters rubbed shoulders with socialites and legitimate businessmen, all unified with the single intent of having a high time with a highball. Both volumes could function equally well as history texts.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"An extremely amusing book, full of facts that are actually facts and very briskly and pleasantly written." -- H. L. Mencken

"This bright book is vivid but accurate, thoroughly informed, and it moves at a smart pace... Entirely interesting to read and worth reading, this book deserves enthusiasm and will get it." -- New York Times Book Review

"Highly entertaining reading." -- Variety

"An extraordinary record written with contagious enthusiasm." -- San Francisco Chronicle

"The first good biography of Broadway. Fast moving, compact, exact." -- New York Daily News

"I know of no volume which is so authentically New York as this, no history of recent contemporary life so amusing -- and so true. A juicy slice of life." -- Boston Transcript

"In this volume flies an endless procession of colorful figures -- all the well-known Broadway names and many not so well known but just as interesting. The book is history -- history so breezily written that the reader, absorbed in anecdote and incident, may not take time out to ponder its authenticity and importance." -- Saturday Review of Literature

About the Author

Stanley Walker was born in Lampasas, Texas, in 1898. After writing for the Austin American-Statesman and the Dallas Morning News, he joined the staff of the New York Herald Tribune as a reporter and rewrite man in 1920. He became night city editor of the Herald Tribune in 1926 and served as city editor from 1928 to 1935. After various jobs with other newspapers and magazines, Walker rejoined the Herald Tribune as editor in 1937. He was appointed editor of the Philadelphia Public Ledger in 1939 and retired from newspaper work a year later. He died in 1962. His books include City Editor (also available in paperback from Johns Hopkins), Mrs. Astor's Horse, Dewey: An American of this Century, and Home to Texas.

Customer Reviews

A great slice of the Roaring Twenties
Had it not been for Jim Cullum's radio program, I would never have found this book and my personal library would be missing a valuable and entertaining novel. Stanley Walker is one of the over looked greats in journalism. Funny and engrossing, this book stands the test of time. I highly recommend this one to anyone interested in the sometimes gaudy, always entertaining night life of the Prohibition era.

Great fun for New York and Roaring Twenties buffs
No dry historical tome is this. Want to know what New York City was like during Prohibition? This is a fun read.