Title | The Paratrooper of Mechanic Avenue |
Year of Publication | 1960 |
Publication Type | Novel |
Number of Pages or Episodes | 246 p. |
Language | English |
Authors | Goran, Lester |
Publisher | Houghton Mifflin Company |
City | Boston |
Keywords | addiction; Black Americans; Chinese Americans; Great Depression, The; Italian Americans; Jewish Americans; Korean War; Pittsburgh Police; Polish Americans; polka; poverty; priests; Prohibition; Protestants; real estate development; Roman Catholics; sex workers; Slovak Americans; soldiers; Syrian Americans; ward heelers |
Abstract | Ike-o Hartwell—born into the fictionalized Hill District slum of Sobaski’s Stairway (named for a Prohibition-Era bootlegger)—learns to survive in 1940s Pittsburgh amid the neon glow of pawnshops and pool halls peopled by racketeers, pimps, gangs, and ward heelers. After a dishonorable discharge from the army, Hartwell dresses as a paratrooper and returns to Mechanic Avenue expecting a hero’s welcome. “Paratrooper is a testament to Goran’s memorializing the lives of the 'ugly hostile people' in the slums,” says the literary critic Matthew Asprey Gear. |
Notes | Allegheny County Industrial and Training School for Boys is referred to as Thorn Hill Reformatory, as it was commonly known. |
Author Biography | Lester Goran (1928-2014), born and raised in a housing project in Pittsburgh's Hill District, was a novelist and professor of English at the University of Miami. He attended Pittsburgh's Fifth Avenue High School and Schenley High School and he earned a BA and MA in English at the University of Pittsburgh. For more than 50 years he wrote fiction set in Pittsburgh. He lived in Miami, Florida. |
Time | 1930s-50s |