The Wild Party

by Joseph Moncure March, Art Spiegelman (Illustrator)

Overview

"Spiegelman's drawings are like demonic woodcuts: every angle, line, and curve jumps out at you. Stylishness and brutishness are in perfect accord."
— The New York Times

Art Spiegelman's sinister and witty black-and-white drawings give charged new life to Joseph Moncure March's Wild Party, a lost classic from 1928. The inventive and varied page designs offer perfect counterpoint to the staccato tempo of this hard-boiled jazz-age tragedy told in syncopated rhyming couplets.

Here is a poem that can make even readers with no time for poetry stop dead in their tracks. Once read, large shards of this story of one night of debauchery will become permanently lodged in the brain. When The Wild Party was first published, Louis Untermeyer declared: "It is repulsive and fascinating, vicious and vivacious, uncompromising, unashamed . . . and unremittingly powerful. It is an amazing tour de force."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780375706431
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/23/1999
Pages:	120
Sales rank:	257,503
Product dimensions:	5.21(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.33(d)

About the Author

Joseph Moncure March was a poet, journalist and screenwriter best known for his two verse narratives, The Wild Party and The Set-Up, the story of a washed-up black boxer. An editor for The New Yorker in the 1920s, he died in 1977.

Art Spiegelman is the author of Maus, A Survivor's Tale, for which he received a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992. He was co-founder and editor of Raw, the acclaimed magazine of avant-garde comics, and is currently a staff artist for The New Yorker and comix editor at Details magazine. He is currently working on Crime Doesn't Pay, an opera libretto about the history of comics. He lives in New York City with his wife, Françoise Mouly, and their two children, Nadja and Dashiell.

What People are Saying About This

William Burrows

The Wild Party?...It's the book that made me want to be a writer.

Editorial Reviews

"The Wild Party?. . . It's the book that made me want to be a writer."
— William Burroughs

The Wild Party may have begun as a dark Prohibition-era morality fable, but, thanks . . . to Spiegelman, it lives again as a funhouse mirror of current fears."
— San Francisco Chronicle

From the Publisher

A lost ``classic''? It's odd how strikingly some writing may date to an era yet can later be resuscitated because of its potential for art and camp, and thus gain a new audience. That's what Spiegelman (Maus I and II) has pulled off here by rediscovering and illustrating this jazzy, insistently rhyming roaring '20s period poem, banned in Boston when first published in 1928. What Spiegelman, in his introduction, calls his ``fetishistic'' pleasure in the poem, penned by the New Yorker's inaugural managing editor, is borne out by March's dither of hard-edged rhythms recounting the boozing, brawling and fractious lovemaking of an all-night party ending in a murder. The characters are hard-boiled and needy-and stereotypically presented. The women, especially, seem deliberately one-dimensional, even offensively so-if one is inclined to take offense at all. But the poem works as a bouncy artifact, and the black-and-white illustrations are appropriately, viscerally graphic, summoning up the sense of a knockabout urban spree with debonair zeal and well-appointed crudeness. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Published in 1928, this racy prose poem follows a night in the life of a vaudeville dancer that includes everything from hot sex to cold murder. This classy edition has 75 drawings by Art Spiegelman (MAUS) and red velvet endpapers.

Library Journal