Clifford Browder’s Wicked City is a collection of short fiction featuring a wide range of people surviving, and trying to fully realize themselves, in turbulent nineteenth-century New York. Among them are:
Whatever their hopes and fears, Browder’s characters cannot live without New York.
They bear witness to the city’s wild diversity, its intensity, its creativity. They are New York.
Getting to know them, readers will better understand this astonishing metropolis, unique yesterday and unique today, the most exciting city in the world.
Doing a biographical sketch of Eliza Jumel was a challenge, given the many myths about herself that she invented. But visiting her former home, the Jumel Mansion in Manhattan, gave me valuable insights. The mansion’s interior is furnished in French Empire style, including items that she is said to have brought back from France. The furnishings show both her elegant taste and her politics, since, like her husband, she was an ardent Bonapartist. She lived in the mansion for many years, and I could imagine her receiving guests, including any of Napoleon’s exiled relatives who, during the Bourbon Restoration, found their way to New York. I couldn’t know Eliza Jumel, but I could know her mansion and how she lived. This was how I approached my subjects: if I couldn’t know them personally, often I could know them through their works. I could know Rudolph Bing through opera productions at the Met; Robert Moses through the parks he ravaged with his throughways; J.P. Morgan through his Library; Ayn Rand and Norman Mailer through their books. This helped a lot. Imagination took it from there.
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