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

"Charyn is a magician.… There isn't another writer in America even remotely like him." —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

It started as an old Indian trail that cut a swath across Manhattan and continued through the Bronx. The Dutch called it Heere Straat (High Street) and then Breede Wegh (Broadway). It was the main road of New Amsterdam, a town that was almost an illusion.…

Once upon a time, Broadway was just another street. In Gangsters & Gold Diggers, Jerome Charyn transports readers back to a swaggering, golden era in American life — the Roaring Twenties — when Broadway suddenly exploded into Broadway.

Damon Runyon was the first chronicler of the Big Street. He created the myth of Broadway, invented the "slanguage." The Ziegfeld Follies became its most important institution ±— everybody, including Zelda Fitzgerald, wanted to be a Follies Girl. Then came Lindy's, a delicatessen and hangout for actors, bootleggers, singers, hustlers, chorus girls, and celebrities. Charyn looks at the men and women who helped make Broadway the most glamorous place on the planet, from Mae West to Fanny Brice, Legs Diamond to Irving Berlin, Louise Brooks to William Randolph Hearst, Scott Fitzgerald to Arnold Rothstein and the Gatsby-like gangster Owen Madden, and many more.

In lively, cinematic prose, 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.

Jerome Charyn was born in the Bronx in 1937 and is the author of more than thirty books, including The Isaac Quartet, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, and Metropolis: New York as Myth, Marketplace and Magical Land. He divides his time between New York and Paris.