Lonely Boy Blues

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Originally published in 1944, Alan Kapelner’s first novel, Lonely Boy Blues, is an intense (though not totally humorless) story of a dysfunctional family living in Brooklyn during World War 2. Written in a style that captures the rhythms of jazz and bebop, it is a precursor to the Beat novels of the 1950s. This expanded 75th-anniversary edition includes Seymour Krim’s 1967 interview with the author from his collection of essays, Shake It For The World, Smartass, and features Arthur Sussman’s cover artwork from the 1956 paperback edition.

Legendary editor Maxwell Perkins, best known for his work on the first novels of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe, wrote that Kapelner had a most unusual talent in narrative, in dialogue, and in perception, and agreed to take on the editing of Lonely Boy Blues. It would be one of his last projects before his death in 1947.