Jerome Charyn: Gangsters & Gold Diggers (USA 2005)

From the Publisher:
Once upon a time Broadway was just another street. In Gangsters & Gold Diggers, Jerome Charyn transports readers back to a swaggering, golden era in American life - the Roaring Twenties - when Broadway suddenly exploded into Broadway.

Damon Runyon was the first chronicler of the Big Street. He created the myth of Broadway, invented the "slanguage." The Ziegfeld Follies became its most important institution - everybody, including Zelda Fitzgerald, wanted to be a Follies Girl. Then came Lindy's, a delicatessen and hangout for actors, bootleggers, singers, hustlers, chorus girls, and celebrities. Charyn looks at the men and women who helped make Broadway the most glamorous place on the planet, from Mae West to Fanny Brice, Legs Diamond to Irving Berlin, Louise Brooks to William Randolph Hearst, Scott Fitzgerald to Arnold Rothstein and the Gatsby-like gangster Owen Madden, and many more.

Jerome Charyn: Gangsters & Gold Diggers. Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway. Da Capo Press, ISBN 1560256435 (December, 2004), 296 p., $14.95.

Jerome Charyn: Gangsters & Gold Diggers (USA 2003)

From the Publisher:
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.

Jerome Charyn: Gangsters & Gold Diggers. Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway. Four Walls Eight Windows, ISBN 1568582781 (November, 2003), 278 p., $24.00.