Dorothy Baker’s Young Man with a Horn is widely regarded as the first jazz novel, and it courses with the verve and swing of the music that defined an era.

From the beginning, Rick Martin loved music and the music loved him. He could pick up a tune so quickly that it didn’t matter to the boss at the Cotton Club that he was underage or to the folks in the band that he was just a white kid. He started out with nothing in the slums of LA, but there was a kind of fate to his ending up on top of the game in the speakeasies and nightclubs of New York. But where instinct and drive are all you need to take you far in music, they aren’t enough to make a life work.

Baker took her inspiration for Young Man with a Horn from the tragic life of Bix Beiderbecke, and the novel went on to be adapted into a successful movie starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, and Doris Day.