The Easiest Way: A Story of Metropolitan Life

In the electric nightlife of early twentieth-century New York, a woman named Laura Murdock is attempting the impossible: to escape the reputation that defines her. She calls herself an actress, though she possesses no theatrical talent whatsoever. In truth, she is what the era bluntly termed a "woman of easy virtue" who has grown weary of her trade and longs for respectability. When she meets John Madison, a green young reporter newly arrived from the provinces, she sees in him a chance at redemption through honest love. But Eugene Walter's 1909 novel refuses the sentimental ending its contemporaries often offered. Laura's past catches up with her, and the city that promised escape becomes the site of her final undoing. Through the lens of her doomed attempt at reform, Walter examines the brutal mathematics of social judgment and the impossibility of truly leaving behind who you once were. The Easiest Way is a stark, unsentimental portrait of metropolitan life, where respectability is a performance and the past always collects its debts.