City Boy- The Adventures of Herbie Bookbinder PDF
Preview City Boy- The Adventures of Herbie Bookbinder
Copyright Copyright 1948, 1952, © 1969 by Herman Wouk Copyright © renewed 1975 by Herman Wouk Preface copyright © 2004 by Herman Wouk Foreword copyright © renewed 1980 by John P. Marquand Jr. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company Hachette Book Group 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com. First eBook Edition: June 2009 ISBN: 978-0-316-07700-2 Contents Copyright Preface ONE: The First Step in the Mending of a Broken Heart TWO: Further Steps THREE: The Visitor FOUR: The “Place” FIVE: The Safe SIX: The Party SEVEN: The Romance of Art and Natural History EIGHT: The Dubbing of General Garbage NINE: Promotion Day TEN: A Man Among Men ELEVEN: On to Manitou TWELVE: Mr. Gauss's Camp Manitou THIRTEEN: The Green Pastures FOURTEEN: The Coming of Clever Sam FIFTEEN: The Envelope Mystery SIXTEEN: The Triumph of Lennie SEVENTEEN: The Victory Speech of Mr. Gauss EIGHTEEN: The Dance NINETEEN: Herbie's Ride—I TWENTY: Herbie's Ride—II TWENTY-ONE: Herbie's Ride—III TWENTY-TWO: The Triumph of Herbie TWENTY-THREE: Disaster TWENTY-FOUR: Lennie and Mr. Gauss Take Falls TWENTY-FIVE: Going Home TWENTY-SIX: The Truth Will Out TWENTY-SEVEN: The Truth Often Hurts TWENTY-EIGHT: The Reward Books by Herman Wouk Novels Aurora Dawn City Boy The Caine Mutiny Marjorie Morningstar Youngblood Hawke Don't Stop the Carnival The Winds of War War and Remembrance Inside, Outside The Hope The Glory A Hole in Texas Plays The Traitor The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial Nature's Way Nonfiction This Is My God The Will to Live On This story is dedicated to my mother PREFACE TO THE 2004 EDITION CITY BOY:The Adventures of Herbie Bookbinder C ity Boy, my second novel, was published in 1948. I had no reason to think then that the book would survive its season, let alone more than half a century. None of my novels ever had a less promising start. Just a year earlier, I had entered the American literary frogpond with a noisy splash, and before that I had never published so much as a short story in a magazine. For my livelihood until World War II, I had been a script writer for the great radio comedian Fred Allen. My first novel, Aurora Dawn, was a facetious spoof of commercial radio, and the little book caught a publisher's fancy, so he launched it with a blast of ecstatic advertising. In quick obedience to Newton's third law, critics blasted back. All this dazed me. A naval reserve officer, I had written most of Aurora Dawn aboard a minesweeper in the South Pacific, to while away boring wartime hours at sea. I did not know enough about the literary world to object to the overblown launching, nor to expect the boisterous counter-attack. It was quite a debut. When the dust settled I had in hand a Book-of-the-Month selection of my first novel, a so-so sale, and a literary reputation demolished before it was built. New authors, fuming over insufficient advertising of their masterpieces, might ponder this true tale. But there I was, a professional novelist, if a somewhat black-and-blue one. I wrote City Boy, and found real delight in the task. To this day the fat little hero, Herbie Bookbinder, remains one of my favorite creations. But my publisher, set back by the critics' onslaught on Aurora Dawn, and probably convinced that no novel with Jewish characters could sell anyway—this was gospel back then in the book trade—launched the work as one buries a body at sea. City Boy slid off the plank, and with scarcely a ripple went bubbling down. No club selected the book. Nobody bought it. Almost nobody reviewed it. The remainder shops were piled with this novel, while I was still reading scattered out-of-town notices. End of poor Herbie, to all appearances. Alas! Total disaster with a second book; a very usual thing. Still, I now had a family, and I had come to love the fiction art. I thought I had better have one more shot at the target. I started another novel. My habit was, and still is, to read my work chapter by chapter to a discerning, lovely, but taciturn wife. Once she suddenly remarked, when I was reading aloud an early scene in that story, “If they don't like this one, you had better try some other line of business.” The book was The Caine Mutiny. Meantime Aurora Dawn and City Boy had gone out of print, but I had a new publisher, who liked the books and brought them back to light. That was about forty-five years ago. Aurora Dawn remains in print, and the publishing history of City Boy since then records successive new editions, translations into several languages, club selections, and usage in school textbooks and anthologies. In the arts, as in most risky walks of life, the good word is never say die. My life goal of authorship was fixed when I first read Tom Sawyer at eleven, and my working title for City Boy was Tom of the Bronx. I grew up in a Bronx neighborhood that later became notorious as Fort Apache, but in my boyhood there were idyllic green spaces called “lots,” and more than a trace of the golden light of Hannibal, Missouri, fell on those stony neighborhoods. That glow was what I tried to capture in City Boy. Without taking the comparison further, I hope that Herbie and his tantalizing Lucille still come to life in their modest citified way, as Tom and Becky Thatcher will do in Mark Twain's book while the English language lasts. Herman Wouk ONE
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