The Wild Party: The Lost Classic by Joseph Moncure March [Paperback]

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

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

Art Spiegelman is the author ofMaus, A Survivor's Tale, for which he received a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992. He was co-founder and editor ofRaw, the acclaimed magazine
of avant-garde comics, and is currently a staff artist forThe New Yorkerand comix editor atDetailsmagazine. He is currently working onCrime Doesn't Pay, an opera libretto about the history of comics. He lives in New York City with his wife, Françoise MoulĂ*