Erik Dorn

Chicago, 1921. Erik Dorn is a newspaper man who knows every bar and backroom in the city, who can spin a headline and charm a stranger's wife with equal ease. But beneath the hard-drinking exterior lies a man quietly dying of emotional malnutrition. Hecht's forgotten masterpiece captures the hollow roar of Prohibition-era Chicago, all jazz and gin and people desperate to feel something. Through Erik's fractured relationship with his elderly father, his turbulent affairs, and his growing alienation from his own life, we witness a man unable to connect, watching himself from a distance like a stranger on a street corner. This is a novel about the first generation to question whether success was just another word for emptiness. Sharp, sexually frank, and unsettlingly prescient.