Round the Block

A New York block in the 1850s - a boarding house, a churchyard, a Wall Street office and a family secret buried under the pavement - seen through the lodgers who watch each other across the yards. Bouton was a newspaperman and wrote his one novel from the city he reported. The comic and the criminal are mixed exactly as they were in the streets he knew. Fifty-five plates by painters including John Sloan and George Luks carry the city's tenement life, its bars and rooftops, into a novel that watches the same streets.