Category: Humour
On either side of the Bowery, which cuts through like a drain to catch its sewage, Every Man's Land, a reeking march of humanity and humidity, steams with the excrement of seventeen languages, flung in _patois_ from tenement windows, fire escapes, curbs, stoops, and cellars wh...
Do not, ascetic reader, gag at the unsocratic plane. True, Max Meltzer had neither the grain nor the leisure of a sophist, a capacity for tenses or an appreciation of Kant. He h...
4. Chapter 4"I--I'm not so sure of that by a long shot. I--I was fed up with the most devilish kind of promises there are. The kind you was too smart to put in words or--or in writing. You-...
14. Chapter 14He patted her arm. "You'll never know, Clara, the torture it's been for me even your going out those few times with Eddie Leonard has put me through. You're mine, Clara; a hundr...
9. Chapter 9They were nosing through a snarl of traffic and over streets wet and slimy with thaw. Men with overcoats flung over their arms side-stepped the snout of the car. Delicatessen an...
5. Chapter 5"Why, Hattie, that child's own mother that loved her like an angel couldn't worry no more foolishly about her than you do. Gad! I think you wimmin love it! It was the same kind...
6. Chapter 6"I can't understand it, Mrs. Schump. I always say there ain't a finer girl on the floor than Stella. When I see other girls, most of 'em fresh little rag-timers that ain't worth...
17. Chapter 17"See, Jas--honest, can you ever get enough of how beautiful it is? When I was a kid on my pap's farm out there, eighty miles beyond the ridge, instead of playing with the kids t...
10. Chapter 10"It is, now. It used to be the old woman's till I laid down on the mother-in-law game and squealed. Yeh, I used to have a little mother-in-law in our house that was some mother-...
11. Chapter 11"It looks like what is it. Fake! The way it reads in that _French Revolution_ by that fellow Carlyle they gave me to read and the way it looks in the picture is the difference o...
12. Chapter 12"She crowds me to profile. They want me full-face. If you'd put in a word to Sol to direct it that way! Other night, at the Buckingham, it was a riot every time I turned full-fa...
18. Chapter 18On a glass runway built over the heads of the assembled, a crystal aisle for satin feet, the row of soubrettes suddenly appeared, peering over the crystal rail, singing down upo...
13. Chapter 13Out toward the blue, the billowing fields sailed away the gray steamer, cutting a path that sprayed and sang after. Sunlight danced and lay whitely as far as the eye could reach...
16. Chapter 16The day, sun-riddled, stare-riddled, sawdusty, and white with glare, slouched into the clanging, banging, electric-pianoed, electrifying Babylonia of a Coney Island Saturday nig...
3. Chapter 3"Oughtn't she be ashamed of herself? Just listen to her, Esther! What will we do with her? Talks like she had a guarantee I wasn't coming back. Why, I wouldn't be surprised if b...
15. Chapter 15"It's this: you see, ma, the way the draft goes. When a fellow's called to war, drafted, he's got to go, no questions asked. But when a fellow enlists for war, volunteers, you s...
2. Chapter 2When he tucked his Stradivarius beneath his chin the book of life seemed suddenly translated to him in melody. Even Sarah Kantor, who still brewed for him, on a small portable s...
7. Chapter 7How much more daringly than my poor pen would venture, did life, all of a backhanded, flying leap of who knows what centrifugal force, transcend for Stella Schump the vague boun...
1. Chapter 1On either side of the Bowery, which cuts through like a drain to catch its sewage, Every Man's Land, a reeking march of humanity and humidity, steams with the excrement of seven...
19. Chapter 19"Then let me go! Whatta you holding me here for? Let me go back, Mrs.--mother! Let me go! I don't deny it, you're too good for me round here. I don't fit! Let me go back to the...