An Atlantic City Reader: The Rise and Decline of an American Resort. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.An Atlantic City Reader: The Rise and Decline of an American Resort

As Atlantic City grew to become one of the largest tourist destinations on the East Coast, it loomed ever larger in the imaginations of American writers. Generation upon generation of novelists, journalists, musicians, and poets visited Atlantic City and left with vivid impressions of its kaleidoscopic delights and its seedy underbelly.

This new reader collects all of these diverse perspectives on the city in one place, including accounts of Atlantic City by such famous visitors as Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Fanny Hurst, Arthur Conan Doyle, Damon Runyon, Langston Hughes, Elmore Leonard, and Bruce Springsteen. Arranged chronologically, the anthology traces the city's history from its humble beginnings as a quiet health resort to its rapid ascent to the world's playground, its gradual decline, and its hopeful if tenuous future. Together, the pieces in this collection take us inside the city's glitz, glamor, and gambling palaces, but they also don't shy away from its troubling histories of racial discrimination, political corruption, and urban decay. Compiling fiction, poetry, drama, memoirs, newspaper stories, and magazine reports, The Atlantic City Reader presents an engaging and multifaceted portrait of this iconic resort town.

LOUIS J. PARASCANDOLA is a professor of English at Long Island University in Brooklyn, NY. He is the author of several books including J.A. Rogers: Voice of the Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Selected Writings and A Coney Island Reader (with John Parascandola).

JOHN PARASCANDOLA (1941-2024) was a professor of the history of pharmacy and history of science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Chief, History of Medicine Division at the National Library of Medicine in Washington DC. He is the author of numerous books, including Studies in the History of Modern Pharmacology and Drug Therapy and King of Poisons: A History of Arsenic.