Gangsters & Gold Diggers: Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway

Jerome Charyn

Thunder's mouth Press, 2004 - History - 296 pages

In this rousing tribute to an unforgettable time and place, Jerome Charyn picks up where Gangs of New York left off and transports readers back to a swaggering, golden era in American life?the Roaring Twenties?when Broadway the street exploded into Broadway the legend. Charyn looks at the men and women who helped make the Big Street the most glamorous place on the planet, from Mae West to Fanny Brice, Legs Diamond to Irving Berlin, Scott Fitzgerald to Arnold Rothstein, and many more. In cinematic prose and numerous photographs, Charyn captures Broadway's vagabondage, outlaw culture, and self-mythologizing. He brings a rollicking, rough-and-tumble period in New York 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," the street known as Broadway.

What people are saying

Review: Gangsters and Gold Diggers: Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway

User Review  - Lauren Albert - Goodreads

Full of interesting stories but scattered and disorganized.

Review: Gangsters and Gold Diggers: Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway

User Review  - Christian - Goodreads

Time travel back to the Jazz Age and get "lit-up" in speakeasies w/ gangsters and their molls, writers and their flapper girlfriends-for-the-night; Duke and Count and Bunny Berigan might be on stage ...

About the author

Jerome Charyn was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1937. An author who primarily writes detective stories, Charyn's novels contain a wide array of characters ranging form a gorgeous, headstrong double agent to a greedy, corrupt lawyer. Charyn chronicles the life of Isaac Sidel El Caballo, the Mayor of New York City, in over half a dozen books, including El Bronx, Little Angel Street, Marilyn the Wild, and The Good Policeman. His latest novel is entitled The Secret Life of emily Dickinson. The story is told from her point of view and incorporates both historical and fictional characters to tell what she may have been like. Widely translated, Charyn's novels have broad readership in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece and Japan, as well as the United States. Charyn lives in Paris where he teaches cinema at the American University of Paris.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Gangsters & Gold Diggers: Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway
• Author: Jerome Charyn
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Thunder's mouth Press, 2004
• ISBN: 1560256435, 9781560256434
• Length: 296 pages
• Subjects: History / General; History / United States / State & Local / General; Travel / United States / General