Pal Joey ─ The Novel and the Libretto and Lyrics

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.

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John O’Hara (1905–1970) was one of the most prominent American writers of the twentieth century. Championed by Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Dorothy Parker, he wrote seventeen novels, includingAppointment in Samarra, his first; BUtterfield 8, which was made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor;Pal Joey, which was adapted into a Broadway musical as well as a film starring Frank Sinatra; andTen North Frederick, which won the National Book Award. He has had more stories published inThe New Yorker than anyone else in the history of the magazine. Born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, he lived for many years in New York and in Princeton, New Jersey, where he died.

Lorenz Hart (1895–1943) was an acclaimed lyricist best known for his collaborations with Richard Rodgers on a number of Broadway scores. His many hit songs with Rodgers include “Blue Moon,” “My Funny Valentine,” and, forPal Joey, “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” and “I Could Write a Book.” Born in Harlem, Hart spent his life in New York City.

Richard Rodgers (1902–1979) was one of the most influential composers in Broadway history. A longtime collaborator with Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II, he wrote more than forty musicals, includingSouth Pacific, The King and I, The Sound of Music, and Oklahoma! He was the first person to win all the major awards in his field—a Grammy, an Emmy, an Oscar, a Tony, and a Pulitzer Prize—and, along with Hammerstein, was named one the twenty most influential artists of the twentieth century by Time magazine and CBS News. Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theatre was dedicated to him in 1990.

Thomas Mallon (foreword) is the author of numerous novels, including Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Yearsand Watergate, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. The recipient of Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award for reviewing and the Vursell prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for distinguished prose style, he has been published inThe New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Book Review.He is a professor of English at George Washington University.