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...
F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby still captivates readers with its vision of 1920s New York as a city of infinite potential, where a...