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Kid Scanlan
Excerpt from Kid Scanlan
A college professor gets five thousand a year, a good lightweight Will grab' that much a fight. A school teacher drags down fifteen a week, and the guy that looks after the boilers in the school buildin' gets thirty!
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
A college professor gets five thousand a year, a good lightweight Will grab' that much a fight. A school teacher drags down fifteen a week, and the guy that looks after the boilers in the school buildin' gets thirty!
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
400 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1920
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 27, 2022
I had the original hardcover of this book. It was an amusing story about the welterweight champion of the world going to Hollywood and the ensuing experiences he has.
January 29, 2017
I have hundreds and hundreds of forgotten public-domain books saved to my Google Books and Kindle apps, waiting to be opened and browsed through or tossed aside whenever the mood strikes. Few of the books that are on academic reading lists or Best Novels of All Time lists are there; my theory as a reader and (maybe) critic is that if I really want to take the literary temperature of an era, I've got to read some of everything. I've been reading this a chapter a night on my tablet for a while now, and finished it last night.
H. C. Witwer was a popular dealer of humorous fiction from the late 1910s to the early 1930s, writing for the big weekly magazines (particularly Collier's) and providing scenarios for the movies (particularly comedy shorts). Stylistically as well as temporally he's right smack between Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon, without the former's jaundiced irony or the latter's economy of expression; but he's energetic, and imaginative, and has a gift for turning (or collecting) a phrase that isn't a thousand miles away from P. G. Wodehouse.
Kid Scanlan combines two of his usual subjects, boxing and Hollywood, but since it was published in 1920, "Hollywood" here means stunt-driven spectacle, driven-snow emoting, and snake oil rather than glamour, debauchery, or sin. It's narrated by the manager of the titular Kid, an Irish boxer, and it certainly reads like it was written for magazine publication first: each chapter is self-contained, with about three hundred words of tin-can philosophizing wind-up before launching into the anecdote's worth of material that constitutes a Witwer plot, and re-introducing the cast at every turn.
It's very much of its time; if I wasn't such a hound for era-specific and genre-specific reading, I couldn't recommend it at all. Not just for racially insensitive attitudes, though there are some, but just because its language is virtually unreadable today without preparation. I had to read the prose in the voice of a minor character from a pre-Code Warner Bros quickie before I got the hang of it. Witwer gets better than this, but rarely rises above C+ or B- compared to the slang-slinging legends of his day.
H. C. Witwer was a popular dealer of humorous fiction from the late 1910s to the early 1930s, writing for the big weekly magazines (particularly Collier's) and providing scenarios for the movies (particularly comedy shorts). Stylistically as well as temporally he's right smack between Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon, without the former's jaundiced irony or the latter's economy of expression; but he's energetic, and imaginative, and has a gift for turning (or collecting) a phrase that isn't a thousand miles away from P. G. Wodehouse.
Kid Scanlan combines two of his usual subjects, boxing and Hollywood, but since it was published in 1920, "Hollywood" here means stunt-driven spectacle, driven-snow emoting, and snake oil rather than glamour, debauchery, or sin. It's narrated by the manager of the titular Kid, an Irish boxer, and it certainly reads like it was written for magazine publication first: each chapter is self-contained, with about three hundred words of tin-can philosophizing wind-up before launching into the anecdote's worth of material that constitutes a Witwer plot, and re-introducing the cast at every turn.
It's very much of its time; if I wasn't such a hound for era-specific and genre-specific reading, I couldn't recommend it at all. Not just for racially insensitive attitudes, though there are some, but just because its language is virtually unreadable today without preparation. I had to read the prose in the voice of a minor character from a pre-Code Warner Bros quickie before I got the hang of it. Witwer gets better than this, but rarely rises above C+ or B- compared to the slang-slinging legends of his day.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews