City of Night

An unnamed young man works as a hustler, selling himself on the streets of American cities, and looks for some understanding of who he is. The book follows him through a nighttime world of other hustlers, drag queens and the people who live around them.

His path runs from El Paso to Times Square, then to Pershing Square and the French Quarter. Each place is lit by neon and populated by its own set of regulars, and the narrator watches them closely.

John Rechy published this as his first novel in 1963. It broke with the fiction of its day by showing a subculture that had rarely been shown so sharply, and some reviewers attacked the author personally. It drew comparisons to Genet and Kerouac and sold widely abroad.

The style is bold and inventive, and the portrait is unflinching rather than softened. This edition adds original marked galley pages and an interview with Rechy. The question running through the pages is whether a life spent on the margins can lead the narrator to self-knowledge.