Pulp Fiction; Or, You Can't Judge a Book by Its Cover

Like the work of many a greater and lesser writer, Kay's novels were republished through the 1940s and 50s in cheap (in both commonly understood senses of the word) paperback editions, tarted up with racy new covers that gave a thoroughly inaccurate and misleading (and certainly intentional) impression of the work therein. 



While the clothes and hairstyles have been brought up-to-date for this 1949 reissue of Young Man, you'd never know that this is actually a Jazz Age story about newspaper reporters, Prohibition, and bootleg whisky!

Young Man of the Movies

It was inevitable that a novel as successful as Young Man of Manhattan would find its way to the silver screen: it arrived in theaters the same year the book was published. In fact, the film rights had been sold even before the Saturday Evening Post serial had concluded! It seems quite astonishing today, the rapidity with which the studios managed to turn bestsellers into movies...such was the demand for talking pictures.

It was the era of raccoon eyes--I mean COATS!

Paramount's Young Man Norman Foster starred opposite his then real-life wife Claudette Colbert in a faithful and straightforward (albeit somewhat condensed) realization of Kay's original. And although it was quite universally lauded by the critics, one reviewer said he wished Miss Colbert had worn rather less eye makeup! 


The picture also starred Charles ("Charlie") Ruggles, best remembered today as the burbling grandfather in Disney's The Parent Trap (1961), and a young Ginger Rogers in her first feature-length motion picture. 

Charlie Ruggles must have been more popular
than Claudette Colbert in Brooklyn back in 1930!

A Man And A Woman

Kay's next—and most successful—
two novels began as magazine serials just like their two prede-
cessors. But their appearance in The Saturday Evening Post is surely evidence of Kay's increased literary stature.  

Young Man of Manhattan debuted in October 1929 (above left), and Red-Headed Woman in the summer of 1931 (above right). Publication in hard covers (below)  followed shortly thereafter.  

Above left: this later-printing jacket of Young Man of Manhattan boasts significantly higher sales (10 times higher!) than Kay's first novel, Glitter. Above right: the rare, first edition dust jacket of Red-Headed Woman depicts a pre-Harlow conception of Lil Andrews.

Left: Inscription inside one of my five copies of Young Man of Manhattan

"Swanie" is H. N. Swanson, Kay's long-time literary agent, whom she met during her days at College Humor. I have a number of Kay's books—all inscribed—that belonged to him.


Swanie was a pretty big deal. You can read what the Times said about him when he died in 1991.

Kay and Me

It started with a photograph.  I have in my collection a book, acquired years ago, titled The Decorative Twenties. In this book was--is--a photograph of a living room in a New York City apartment.  It was, in this young Long Island boy's eye and mind at least, the epitome of art deco style and elegance, and I thought, “someday  I will have an apartment in Manhattan with a living room like that.” And that was it; I never, over the course of several decades, paid any attention whatsoever to the who, what, where or when...

Flash forward twenty years, and I am working at an art and architecture non-profit (which shall forever remain nameless in these pages) in Manhattan.  

David Garrard Lowe, whose book Art Deco New York has recently been published, presents an illustrated lecture.  And, don't you know it... there's that photograph of that living room I know and love from my book!  So Mr. Lowe tells us that this is the living room in the Joseph Urban-designed apartment of the writer Katharine Brush.  

I confess that the name Joseph Urban didn't really mean anything to me at the time (more on him later), but I made note of the name Katharine Brush, and thought, “I wonder if her books are any good...they might be worth a look.”

I then discovered that Brush had written the novel upon which the movie Red-Headed Woman had been based.  I of course was familiar with the picture and had seen it.  It is, as I mentioned previously, a classic of pre-code Hollywood; I felt as though I already knew Katharine Brush...

Since I was so familiar with Red-Headed Woman, I figured it best to start with a different Brush novel, something that would be entirely new to me.  I decided on Young Man of Manhattan, from 1929.  Halfway through it I was hooked. 

Young Woman of Manhattan:
Katharine Brush

By the way, I did get the apartment in Manhattan...

but the living room looks nothing like I had planned.