A01=Polly Adler
archival recovery of lost voices
Author_Polly Adler
brothel-era cultural intersections
Category=DNBM
Category=JBSF1
clandestine social spaces
complex portrayals of criminal worlds
controversial women of history
corruption in metropolitan politics
criminal-era social networks
cultural memory recovery
early media fascination with vice
early twentieth-century moral panics
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnic identity in urban settings
feminist archival recovery
forgotten bestseller revival
gangster social circles
gender and criminality scholarship
gendered perspectives on crime
hidden female narratives
hidden histories of women
historical depictions of marginalized women
historical taboo subjects
immigrant women's stories
intersections of crime and culture
jazz age criminal networks
Jewish American urban life
legacy of vice culture
life stories from the margins
literary memoir rediscovery
Manhattan cultural history
midcentury publishing phenomena
narrative of survival and resilience
New York vice history
notorious madams
Old New York atmosphere
police graft narratives
prohibition-era scandals
rediscovered autobiographical classics
Roaring Twenties nightlife
second-wave interest in women's lives
sexuality and power dynamics
social climbing in immigrant communities
social forces shaping city life
sociology of illicit economies
stories of reinvention and mobility
underworld celebrity culture
untold stories of New York
urban shadow economies
vibrant immigrant neighborhoods
vice district lore
vintage Hollywood adaptation context
women in the underworld
Product details
- ISBN 9781558495593
- Weight: 467g
- Dimensions: 138 x 207mm
- Publication Date: 01 Nov 2006
- Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Polly Adler's ""house"" - the brothel that gave this best-selling 1953 autobiography its title - was a major site of New York City underworld activity from the 1920s through the 1940s. Adler's notorious Lexington Avenue house of prostitution functioned as a sort of social club for New York's gangsters and a variety of other celebrities, including Robert Benchley and his friend Dorothy Parker. According to one New York tabloid, it made Adler's name ""synonymous with sin."" This new edition of Adler's autobiography brings back into print a book that was a mass phenomenon, in both hardback and paperback, when it was first published. A self-consciously literary work, ""A House Is Not a Home"" provides an informal social history of immigrant mobility, prostitution, Jewish life in New York, police dishonesty, the ""white slavery"" scare of the early twentieth century, and political corruption. Adler's story fills an important gap in the history of immigrant life, urban experience, and organized crime in New York City. While most other accounts of the New York underworld focus on the lives of men, from Herbert Asbury's ""Gangs of New York"" through more recent works on Jewish and Italian gangsters, this book brings women's lives and problems to the forefront. ""A House Is Not a Home"" is compellingly readable and was popular enough to draw Hollywood's attention in the early 1960s - leading to a film starring Shelley Winters as Adler. The book has been largely forgotten in the ensuing decades, lost both to its initial audience of general readers and to scholars in women's studies, immigration history, and autobiography who are likely to find it a treasure trove. Now, with a new introduction by Rachel Rubin that contextualizes Adler's life and literary achievement, ""A House Is Not a Home"" is again available to the many readers who have come to understand such ""marginal"" life stories as a special refraction of the more typical American success narrative.
POLLY ADLER was born in Yanow on the Russian/Polish border in 1900, emigrated to New York City in 1912, and died in California in 1962. RACHEL RUBIN is associate professor of American studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston and author of Jewish Gangsters of Modern Literature.
