A generous fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation helped me to write this novel.
I owe special thanks to the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen’s Library on West Forty-fourth Street in Manhattan—already long established in 1928, and still going strong. Among many dozens of books treating 1920s New York, I am particularly grateful to: Will Irwin, Highlights of Manhattan (1927); Joe Laurie, Jr., Vaudeville: From the Honky-Tonks to the Palace (1953); Caroline Seebohm, The Man Who Was Vogue: The Life and Times of Condé Nast (1982); and The Encyclopedia of New York City, ed. Kenneth T. Jackson (1995). As always, I hasten to note that I am writing fiction, not history, and that I’ve availed myself of many small liberties, from the architectural to the zoological.
I could not have done without the crazy rhythms of Roger Wolfe Kahn, whose incomparably evocative music has filled my study for the past three years.
Over the past decade it’s been my great good fortune to have Dan Frank as an editor. Andrea Barrett is a near-daily source of advice and inspiration in my life. Frances Kiernan, Richard Bausch, André Bernard, Michael Collier, and Sloan Harris are other indispensable presences.
But, above all, thanks to Bill Bodenschatz.
Westport, Connecticut
July 12, 2003