Son of a Yorkville tailor and his wife, the most outrageous and voluble of the legendary Marx brothers had a career that stretched from vaudeville to gameshow, conquering Hollywood on the way. This is his story.

(Applause Books). Groucho Marx was a comic genius who starred on stage and in film, radio, and television. But he was also a gifted writer the author of a play, two screenplays, seven books, and over 100 articles and essays. This newly expanded collection presents the best of Groucho's short comic pieces, written over a period of more than fifty years between 1919 and 1973 for the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Saturday Evening Post, Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, and other newspapers and magazines. Here is the one and only Groucho on his family, his days in vaudeville, his career,...

In 1919 Nick Dandolos arrived in Chicago from Greece, pursuing the American dream. Instead, tempted into a high-stakes game of cards, he is driven to humiliation and defeat. From these depths he begins his painstaking mastery of the skills of gambling under the tutelage of the crafty old gambler, Nestor, who says, "If God wished to learn to gamble, he would come to me."Wreaking vengeance on the powerful gangsters who had beaten him, Nick begins a meteoric ascent that carries him through no-limit games with kings and tycoons, and, finally, gains for himself legendary status as "Nick the Greek."