The Paratrooper of Mechanic Avenue by Lester Goran, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, is a Stated First Printing, 1960.
A cast of unique characters create a Dickensian world of vitality in which the reader is caught up and carried away. Far from the usual "slum novel", the book is realistic and written with extraordinary craftsmanship. First Printing. The novel's central character is Ike-o Hartwell, who was born in a toilet in a Pittsburgh slum called Sobaski's Stairway.
He grew up amid the neon glow of pawn shops and poolrooms on Mechanic Avenue, where the purple nights resounded to the clank and clatter of the street cars, the prancing polkas from Souick's Social Hall, the plaintive hymns filtering from store-front churches. His huge, immobile mother and most of his neighbors were Poles, and there were street fights with encroaching waves of Jews, Italians, Syrians and Negroes.
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