Brendan Behan 's NEW YORK

First Paperback Edition, 1984. 160 pages. Has some watermarking, overall very good condition. Post €3.50

'You're FBI, Brendan,' said the proprietor of McSorley's, the famous old ale house.
So the Foreign Born Irish, Brendan Behan, takes us on his last tour of, he calls 'the most exciting city in the world'.

His anthropological investigations cover a wide variety of places, people and things, and are always accompanied by a ribald anecdote and rumbustious description. Whether he is buying a paper off an old lady in Harlem, swimming in the baths at the Young Men's Hebrew Association, visiting a 'bum' on the Bowery, or having a jar with 'one of his own' in an Irish saloon on Third Avenue, he always has an eye for the colour of the situation and the wit to express it. Neither the serious nor the absurd is secure from his investigations, and the 'sacred cows' fall happily.

Intellectually stimulating, Brendan Behan discusses Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation and Scott Fitzgerald and the Lost Generation of the twenties. He discourses on his meeting with Alan Ginsberg, Frank Fields, the coloured composer, George Kleinsinger, the composer of Archie and Mehitabel, Arthur Miller, James Baldwin, Agnes O'Neill Boulton, the widow of Eugene O'Neill, and many others.

The spirit of the text is brilliantly complemented by Paul Hogarth, whose drawings evoke a nostalgia for the known and not so well-known features of the 'melting pot of the world'.