Lonely Boy Blues

Originally published in 1944 Alan Kapelners first novel Lonely Boy Blues is an intense (though not totally humorless) story of a dysfunctional family living in Brooklyn during World War 2. Written in a style that captures the rhythms of jazz and bebop it is a precursor to the Beat novels of the 1950s. This expanded 75th-anniversary edition includes Seymour Krims 1967 interview with the author from his collection of essays Shake It For The World Smartass and features Arthur Sussmans cover artwork from the 1956 paperback edition. Legendary editor Maxwell Perkins best known for his work on the first novels of Ernest Hemingway F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe wrote that Kapelner had a most unusual talent in narrative in dialogue and in perception and agreed to take on the editing of Lonely Boy Blues. It would be one of his last projects before his death in 1947.