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For its 75th anniversary and Frank Sinatra’s centennial: the Jazz Age masterpiece that inspired the iconic Sinatra film and the hit Broadway musical, and featuring the musical’s libretto and lyrics
 
On the seedy side of Chicago nightlife in the 1930s, Joey Evans is a poor man’s Bing Crosby—a big-talking, small-time nightclub crooner down on his luck but always on the make. In slangy, error-littered letters signed “Pal Joey,” he recounts his exploits with brash nightclub managers, shady business partners, and every pretty girl (“mouse”) he meets. Charismatic yet conniving, Pal Joey is a smooth operator whose bravado and big ideas disguise a far less self-assured soul, caught up in the rags-to-riches dream of the Jazz Age.

Originally serialized in The New Yorker and the inspiration for the 1940 Rodgers and Hart musical of the same name and the 1957 film starring Frank Sinatra, Kim Novak, and Rita Hayworth, Pal Joey is the story of a true “heel,” as complex and memorable as any antihero in American literature.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. “O’Hara, by many standards, including sales, is one of the most successful writers in the English language. . . . [His character] Joey Evans was a lowlife heel who bragged, charmed, cheated and lied his way into low-watt stardom. But as characters go, he sure lasted.” —Scott Simon, NPR’s Weekend Edition

“As Mad Men continues to draw big ratings, I sense that O’Hara’s moment for a really breakout revival . . . may at last be upon us. . . . If this is your first encounter with John O’Hara, I can only say, in the words of Joey: ‘Low and behold.’ ” —Thomas Mallon, from the Foreword

“There can be no doubt but that [Pal Joey is] part of his best work.” —The New York Times

“O’Hara was probably the most gifted writer of dialogue in mid-20th century American fiction. And when he gets around to fracturing dialogue the way people do in real life, he’s very funny. He doesn’t overdo it. It bounces right up from the page at you. If you read the sentences out loud—and of course what he did was adapt his book for the stage so they could be read out loud—they just land on a dime, all of them.” —Thomas Mallon, NPR’s Weekend Edition

“If ever an author was ripe for a critical rebranding, it’s John O’Hara.” —Jonathan Dee, from the Introduction to Ten North Frederick

“O’Hara remains one of America’s greatest social novelists of the twentieth century. . . . He captured one of the most far-reaching social transformations in American history.” —The Atlantic

“[O’Hara] was as acute a social observer as Fitzgerald, as spare a stylist as Hemingway.” —Los Angeles Times

“An author I love is John O’Hara. . . . I think he's been forgotten by time, but for dialogue lovers, he’s a goldmine of inspiration.” —Douglas Coupland, Shelf Awareness

“O’Hara occupies a unique position in our contemporary literature. . . . He is the only American writer to whom America presents itself as a social scene in the way it once presented itself to Henry James, or France to Proust.” —Lionel Trilling, The New York Times
 
“Pal Joey is successful as satire, because Mr. O’Hara is not afraid to go the whole hog.” —Edmund Wilson, The New Republic