Charles Gorham

"This is a brilliant book written by a brilliant man who has no fear expressing his ideas." Birmingham News This is the driving, compassionate story of a young man's coming of age, a well-born rebel who defies his family's two hundred years of aristocratic tradition...and flees the horrors that churn beneath its tranquil surface. Avery Hollister grew up admiring his father, loving his gentle mother too much, and believing in the aristocratic Hollister tradition. And then he sees his family as it really is. His father, a faithless bully, is anxious to preserve appearances at any cost, while his mother, suffering from lack of love, is slowly losing her mind. So Avery makes a bitter break. He leaves the great New England mansion whose hidden tragedies threatened to ensnare him, and escapes to Manhattan, where he rooms with the son of an immigrant family and falls in love with an enchanting Greenwich Village woman... and through the pain and ecstasy, tears and laughter, begins to discover a whole new life that's unshackled from the past. "Written with passionate conviction. Gorham is rapidly developing into a major American novelist." Indianapolis Times "It is real and earnest without being woundingly ugly. Often you'll feel that you're reading a mid-century F. Scott Fitzgerald and that is only one of this book's pleasant virtues." Courier-Journal "A penetrating novel," Philadelphia Inquirer "Gorham has matured into a really important novelist. This book convinces me that, except for John P. Marquand, there is not a single master of fiction writing today who knows as much or writes as well about New England families." Knoxville Journal "Gorham's novel is an ambitious one, containing some excellent writing." Kansas City Star "An excellent example of the coming-of-age novel. Gorham writes with wit tempered by compassion." Greensboro News & Record

Finally back in print This ground-breaking, controversial novel, banned in Australia and other countries for it's "homosexual references," was the dream acting/directing project of actor Sal Mineo, who was tragically murdered only hours after learning the movie would finally be made. Vincent McCaffery is a bright, good-looking, and gifted teenager hustler who seduces both men and women for money. He moves from a NY tenement into a plush Greenwich Village brothel, hoping to make it rich, but he falls in love with a prostitute and then plunges into a world of decadence and violence when an older man becomes obsessed with him. "It's about a boy hustler and a girl hustler who fall in love. It deals with the essential purity of love. The story's essentials remind me of Crime & Punishment and the boy especially reminds me of Roskolnikov." Sal Mineo "McCaffery takes us to the very limits of depravity and then beyond. The prostitution of the soul as well as the body is presented in this novel in a vigorous fashion." Nashville Banner "Gorham relates it all with economy, believable sobriety, and dramatic depth of feeling. He has succeeded in making this story of a seemingly lost life into a Greek drama of universal elements." Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY) "Gordham has written a perfectly horrible story of perversion in the big city." Manchester Evening News (UK) "A full-fledged portrait of a working-class Irish boy who becomes a hustler and call boy. Gorham's novels, literary works with pot-boiler topics (prostitution, alcoholism, street crime), were known for their bluntness and realism. McCaffery's power lies not so much in its expose of male prostitution, but in its protagonist's troubled, sexualized relationship with his brutal father." Michael Bronski, Pulp Friction "Fast-paced, magnetizing...shrewd and literate." Los Angeles Times "While the gay characters of this novel are not central or well developed, the larger questions around blackmail, what would later be known as gay-bashing, and exploitation of teenage boys for prostitution are central. This is a dark story of money, power and poverty." Homofabula "This is a raw book, one of the most controversial novels of recent years. For readers old enough to know where babies come from, Lady Chatterley's Lover is really a dull book. Nobody can say that about McCaffery." Frederick Wertham, author of Seduction of the Innocent.

"Charles Gorham has written a masterpiece. It is a remarkable tour-de-force in character study that will stick in one's mind for a long time. But it is not for the squeamish." Chicago Tribune Mattie Dolan is a clever and ambitious, 19-year-old sociopath, back from WWII and striving in the backstreets, tenements and dark alleys of New York to rise above the squalor that shaped him... and conquer the city. He does it with casual violence, brutal sex, and by shrewdly manipulating others to commit crimes and other horrors for him. Along the way, he ruthlessly reveals the seething darkness that lurks behind the vast city's many deceptive guises, each a mirror-image of his own pitiless soul. "The expertness of Mr. Gorham's writing is evident on every page. A study of juvenile delinquency and its final flowering, makes its points in the crudest and most violent terms. One believes everything this doomed young destroyer of society does and says." New York Times "An unforgivable book. Censor bait." Kirkus Reviews