The Tenants of Moonbloom

By Edward Lewis Wallant
Introduction by Dave Eggers

Norman Moonbloom is a loser, a drop-out who can't even make it as a deadbeat. His brother, a slumlord, hires him to collect rent in the buildings he owns in Manhattan. Making his rounds from apartment to apartment, Moonbloom confronts a wildly varied assortment of brilliantly described urban characters, among them a gay jazz musician with a sideline as a gigolo, a Holocaust survivor, and a brilliant young black writer modeled on James Baldwin. Moonbloom hears their cries of outrage and abuse; he learns about their secret sorrows and desires. And as he grows familiar with their stories, he finds that he is drawn, in spite of his best judgment, into a desperate attempt to improve their lives.

Edward Lewis Wallant's astonishing comic tour de force is a neglected masterpiece of 1960s America.

Read the introduction (PDF)

Reviews

...a remarkable tour de force in which this gifted writer takes the elements of several "Street Scenes," and spins them faster and faster like a deranged merry-go-round.
— Martin Levin, New York Times Book Review

...a triumph of art over life. Encircled by ugliness, hemmed in by poverty, Moonbloom's tenants are imperiously alive. Petty, quarrelsome, and querulous, but never dull, they achieve a genuine urban poetry.
— David Boroff, Saturday Review

No one since Nathanael West has written better of the rootlessness of metropolitan life. West is a writer whom Wallant resembles not only in his untimely death after early brilliant promise, but for his special Jewish sensibility and...profound moral concern....
— Time

These final pages...must be considered as among the most joyfully uplifting, the most ennobling, of any penned by a serious talent....a master in rendering the human voice.
— Leon Rooke, Lost Classics

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