The Tenants of Moonbloom (New York Review Books Classics)
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
Norman Moonbloom is a loser, a drop-out who can't even make it as a deadbeat. His brother, a slumlord, hires him to collect rent in the buildings he owns in Manhattan. Making his rounds from apartment to apartment, Moonbloom confronts a wildly varied assortment of brilliantly described urban characters, among them a gay jazz musician with a sideline as a gigolo, a Holocaust survivor, and a brilliant young black writer modeled on James Baldwin. Moonbloom hears their cries of outrage and abuse; he learns about their secret sorrows and desires. And as he grows familiar with their stories, he finds that he is drawn, in spite of his best judgment, into a desperate attempt to improve their lives.
Edward Lewis Wallant's astonishing comic tour de force is a neglected masterpiece of 1960s America.
About the Author
EDWARD LEWIS WALLANT (1926-1962) was born in New Haven, Connecticut. After serving in World War II as a Navy gunner's mate, he moved to New York where he attended the Pratt Institute and the New School for Social Research before going to work as an advertising artist. Wallant was thirty when he began to write seriously, producing four novels over the next six years. His first, The Human Season, appeared in 1960 and won the Harry and Ethel Daroff Memorial Fiction Award, since renamed the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish American Fiction. His second, The Pawnbroker, published in 1961, secured him the reputation as a major new talent: it was nominated for the National Book Award and was later made into a movie, the first American film to depict the inside of the Nazi death camps. In 1962, Wallant was finally able to leave his work in advertising behind, and he spent most of the year touring Europe with his family while writing his last two books. Upon his return to the US, he submitted The Tenants of Moonbloom to his publisher, and was busy making last revisions on The Children at the Gate when he died of a ruptured aneurysm on December 5, 1962.
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