Billy Bathgate

Open this book and enter through his own words the perilous, thrilling world of Billy Bathgate, the brazen boy who has insinuated himself into the inner circle of the notorious Dutch Schultz gang to become good-luck charm, apprentice and finally protege to one of the great murdering gangsters of his time.

Meet the low-browed gunman Lulu Rosenkrantz; the fastidious Irving, precise in everything he does, from mixing drinks to disposing of dead men; the financial genius Abbadabba Berman, who invents a way to change the day's winning number at the last moment; and of course the kid who was once known to the Bronx as Arthur Flegenheimer, the man now known to the world as Dutch Schultz.

Like an urban Tom Sawyer in a world of horrors, Billy has come down from the tenement streets of the East Bronx to live in the glamorously evil Depression underworld that Schultz has created. It is a world of storm-tossed tugboat rides through the dark night of New York Harbor as a gang member is about to be ceremonially drowned, his feet in a bucket of setting cement; of Seventh Avenue window washers falling mysteriously from their scaffolds; of three-day parties in West Side brothels and visits to the blue-lit nightclubs that are the beat of Broadway columnists. It is a world of elegant socialites, cunning Tammany ward heelers, mobsters, bankers, lawyers, and men of the cloth. Black Packards cruise the streets and not even infants in their carriages are safe from the bullets of warring gunmen.

In a prose that astonishes with its lyric intensity, Billy makes us intimates of his fateful adventures within the world of Dutch Schultz. As we move with him into ever deeper dimensions of horror and exhilaration, as he offers up his soul ever more recklessly, Billy reveals this world to us as the brutal, eroticized, farcical, and morally startling place that it is.

The luminous transformation of fact into fiction that became E.L. Doctorow's trademark with Ragtime, the eerie evocations of collective dreams that haunted Loon Lake and World's Fair, come to triumphant fruition in Billy Bathgate. Here is Doctorow's masterpiece, combining with stunning force his tremendous powers, illuminating history as myth and transforming the half-understood, hauntingly remembered materials of our culture into brilliant art. The result is one of those rare shocks of recognition that tell us how we have become what we are.

Billy Bathgate, a "capable boy," in the words of Dutch Schultz, will live in the minds of E.L. Doctorow's readers for many years to come, a fixed star in the American universe, as poignant and mysterious as American life itself.

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