Quaker City

In 1845, George Lippard detonated a literary bomb beneath American letters. "Quaker City" became the nation's first mass-market bestseller, a sensation that outsold everything until "Uncle Tom's Cabin", and it nearly landed its author in prison for obscenity. Set in the labyrinthine boarding house called Monk Hall, the novel drags Philadelphia's respectable elite into the light and shows them for what they really are: bankers who scheme, reverends who rape, murderers who pray. Lippard's Philadelphia is a city of secret chambers and hidden passageways, where the钱 men of society descend into darkness to feed their grotesque appetites. This is no moralistic tract, though. It's a wildly entertaining tour through vice, a Gothic horror story that just happens to be about the men who run America. Lippard wrote with the fury of a radical and the instincts of a pulp master, and the result is a novel that feels remarkably modern: angry, carnivorous, and utterly unwilling to look away.