Polly Adler’s house–the brothel that gave this best-selling 1953 autobiography its title–was a major site of New York City underworld activity from the 1920s through the 1940s. Adler’s notorious Lexington Avenue house of prostitution functioned as a sort of social club for New York’s gangsters and a variety of other celebrities, including Robert Benchley and his friend Dorothy Parker. According to one New York tabloid, it made Adler’s name synonymous with sin.” –Google Books.

1954 Reprint

Condition: Good condition. The covers and spine are a little shelf rubbed, marked and a touch edge worn. Internally the pages are clean and complete. The text is legible. No dust jacket. Please see images.

281 Pages, Hardback

20x14x2.5cm

A self-consciously literary work, A House Is Not a Home provides an informal social history of immigrant mobility, prostitution, Jewish life in New York, police dishonesty, the “white slavery” scare of the early twentieth century, and political corruption.

Adler’s story fills an important gap in the history of immigrant life, urban experience, and organized crime in New York City. While most other accounts of the New York underworld focus on the lives of men, from Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York through more recent works on Jewish and Italian gangsters, this book brings women’s lives and problems to the forefront.

A House Is Not a Home is compellingly readable and was popular enough to draw Hollywood’s attention in the early 1960s―leading to a film starring Shelley Winters as Adler. The book has been largely forgotten in the ensuing decades, lost both to its initial audience of general readers and to scholars in women’s studies, immigration history, and autobiography who are likely to find it a treasure trove. Now, with a new introduction by Rachel Rubin that contextualizes Adler’s life and literary achievement, A House Is Not a Home is again available to the many readers who have come to understand such “marginal” life stories as a special refraction of the more typical American success narrative.

Adler was a Russian Jewish immigrant who went on to own one of the most prominent brothels in Jazz Age New York. She was finally shut down in 1944, moved to California, and went to college and got her B.A. Good for her! Then she wrote her memoir, which was a huge best seller. Sex sells. It is fascinating, and not merely as a period piece.