Taking Chances

The talk of the racetrack, the poolroom and the saloon, taken down by a man who spent his working life listening to it: touts, bookmakers, gamblers who cannot stop, and the philosophy each has worked out to explain why he is not a fool. Cullen wrote for the New York Sun and made these sketches out of overheard speech; the slang is the real record, and nobody else preserved it this exactly. Sixty plates by George Bellows and Everett Shinn, from the Palisades coast to the Canfield gambling house, catch the same sharp-eyed crowd at play.