Round the Block

In Round the Block (1864), John Bell Bouton, a newspaper editor who later became a travel writer, stirs together comedy and pathos to explore the schemes and dreams of the average and extraordinary people inhabiting and intermingling on a single New York City block. In the path of the novel's circumambulation lie mystery, romance, and a murder trial, as love-matches and fortunes are made and lost through invention, speculation, and flimflam - plenty of flimflam. This richly-charactered novel, told with Dickensian brio, offers a fascinating slice of life, vivid in detail, of the bustling big-city habits and mores of America shortly before the Civil War. (Introduction by Grant Hurlock)