Available:*
Library | Collection | Collection | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Beale Memorial Library (Kern Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Adult Fiction | FIC MOEHRING J Sutton | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Coalinga District Library (Coalinga-Huron) | Searching... Unknown | Fiction Area | F MOE | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Rathbun Branch Library (Kern Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Adult Fiction | FIC MOEHRING J Sutton | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Sunnyside Branch Library (Fresno Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Adult Fiction Area | MOEHRIN J Sutton | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Woodward Park Library (Fresno Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Adult Fiction Area | MOEHRIN J Sutton | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
"What Hilary Mantel did for Thomas Cromwell and Paula McLain for Hadley Hemingway . . . Moehringer does for bank robber Willie Sutton" in this fascinating biographical novel of America's most successful bank robber ( Newsday ).
Willie Sutton was born in the Irish slums of Brooklyn in 1901, and he came of age at a time when banks were out of control. Sutton saw only one way out and only one way to win the girl of his dreams. So began the career of America's most successful bank robber. During three decades Sutton became so good at breaking into banks, the FBI put him on its first-ever Most Wanted List. But the public rooted for the criminal who never fired a shot, and when Sutton was finally caught for good, crowds at the jail chanted his name.
In J.R. Moehringer's retelling, it was more than need or rage that drove Sutton. It was his first love. And when he finally walked free -- a surprise pardon on Christmas Eve, 1969 -- he immediately set out to find her.
"Electrifying." -- Booklist (starred)
"Thoroughly absorbing . . . Filled with vibrant and colorful re-creations of not one but several times in the American past." --Kevin Baker, author of Strivers Row
"[J.R. Moehringer] has found an historical subject equal to his vivid imagination, gimlet journalistic eye, and pitch-perfect ear for dialogue. By turns suspenseful, funny, romantic, and sad--in short, a book you won't be able to put down." --John Burnham Schwartz, author of Reservation Road and The Commoner
Author Notes
J. R. Moehringer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and novelist. He is the author of The Tender Bar (2005) and Sutton (2012). He collaborated on Andre Aggassi's memoir Open (2012).
Moehringer graduated from Yale University in 1986. He began his journalism career as a news assistant at The New York Times later moving to Breckenridge, Colorado to work at the Rocky Mountain News and even later he became a reporter for the Orange County bureau of the Los Angeles Times. Moehringer eventually was sent to Atlanta to serve as the LA Times national correspondent on the south.
Moehringer received the Literary Award, PEN Center USA West and the Livingston Award for Young Journalists, both in 1997 and a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2000.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Moehringer, a Pulitzer Prize winner for feature writing in 2000, brings infamous bank robber Willie "The Actor" Sutton to life in his inventive debut novel (after the memoir The Tender Bar). True to history, the ailing 68-year-old Sutton was released from prison on Christmas Eve 1969 and spent the following day with a reporter. Though the journalist's actual take on that day revealed little, Moehringer uses the excursion as an entree into Sutton's dramatic life. The ex-con revisits old haunts, recalls successful and failed heists, and reminisces about the woman he sought always to impress. Alternating between Christmas Day and Sutton's earlier years, Moehringer stays in the present tense, making the action immediate, but the shifts in time easy to miss. Nevertheless, he paints a mesmerizing portrait of a remarkable man: a talented thief, an aspiring novelist, and a student of the classics ("Dante, Plato, Shakespeare, Freud") even in prison, where he spent half his life. The author's eye for detail and sense of place make every stop on Sutton's internal and external journeys resonate-from smoking a Chesterfield to Sutton's first sight of the moon as a free man, every scene is saturated with life. Agent: Mort Janklow, Janklow & Nesbit. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A "non-fiction novel" that takes us far beyond Willie Sutton's clever one-liners about banks and deeply into his life. Born in Irish Town in Brooklyn, Willie never quite fit into his own family. His father was a taciturn blacksmith at a time when automobiles were starting to become the rage, and Willie's brothers had an unaccountable hatred for their younger sibling. Willie was smart and sensitive but came of age during some parlous economic times and considered banks and bankers the symptom of life as a rigged game. Moehringer also depicts Willie as a hopeless romantic who falls deeply in love with Bess Endner, daughter of a rich shipyard owner. After the brief exhilaration of a robbery at the shipyard, abetted by Bess, Willie and his cronies are caught and sentenced to probation, and thus begins a life on the outside of social respectability. By the 1930s, Willie is the most famous bank robber in the country, known in part for his gentility and the way in which he approaches his craft. He's never loud or violent but instead devoted to artful disguises and making clean and quiet getaways (hence his nickname, the Actor). Not everything works smoothly, of course, for he's incarcerated for many years, but he ironically becomes something of a folk hero for breaking out of several prisons. His final release, at Christmas in 1969, following a 17-year stretch in the slammer, has him retracing his past in the company of a reporter and photographer. Moehringer cleverly presents the antiphonal voices of Willie in the present (i.e., at the time of his release) and Willie in the past to give a rich accounting of his life, including his love for the works of Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Freud, Jung and Joyce. Whatever else you can say about Willie, in prison he got an excellent education. A captivating and absorbing read.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* When Willie Sutton, the Babe Ruth of bank robbers, was released from Attica on Christmas Eve 1969, he had stolen more than $2 million from banks, engineered three dazzling prison breaks, and become a folk hero to thousands of cash-strapped Americans who had weathered three serious recessions while the banks rode high. Sutton was 68 and in failing health but agreed to do an interview. This is Moehringer's fictional take on that real-life event as Sutton, gruffly addressing the reporter and photographer as kids, is driven all over New York City, visiting the places that shaped him for good or ill. As Sutton is consumed by his memories, Moehringer (The Tender Bar, 2005) relays, in electrifying prose, the highs and lows of Sutton's dramatic life, from the thrill of the heist and his great, doomed love affair to the brutal interrogations by cops and the hell of years spent in solitary confinement. Readers will be riveted by this colorful portrayal of a life in crime spurred by a hatred for banks, but Moehringer, in his first novel, isn't content to stop there. He takes it several layers deeper, probing the psyche of an enigmatic man who had a genius for thievery and an even greater capacity for self-delusion.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
BY ROBERT POLITO HISTORICAL fiction might disappoint for lots of recondite literary reasons, but some imaginative recreations just can't live up to their reallife originals. Paradoxical and elusive, the bank robber Willie Sutton would appear to be a ready-made candidate for a smart, kaleidoscopic novel along the lines of T. Coraghessan Boyle's "Road to Wellville," Don DeLillo's "Libra" and James Ellroy's "L.A. Confidential," or even for a crafty biopic with the chameleonlike spirit of Todd Haynes's "I'm Not There," in which six actors play aspects of Bob Dylan. Within the annals of 20th-century crime, Willie Sutton was everywhere and no one, at once a "Top 10 Most Wanted Fugitives" celebrity, eventually sought after as a talk-show guest by Dick Cavett and Merv Griffin, and yet also a cipher, capable of disappearing for years in plain sight as an orderly at a Staten Island hospital and passing his final days in a Spring Hill, Fla., chop house. He acquired the alias "Willie the Actor" for his propensity to knock off banks and jewelry stores while costumed in police, post office and messenger uniforms rented from theatrical shops along with fake mustaches and other disguises. His targets, he said, saw "only the uniform and not the face," but as his fame grew, Sutton turned to plastic surgery. His two ghosted autobiographies, "I, Willie Sutton" (1953) and "Where the Money Was" (1976), diverge on details of names, crimes, motives and authorial personality. He denied ever pronouncing "Sutton's law," his enduring addition to the American vernacular - the answer to the question of why he robbed banks: "Because that's where the money is." His other accounts of his larcenous inspiration mixed crime as high art ("an irresistible challenge") and compulsion: "I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life." Although Sutton's myth was synonymous with meticulously plotted thievery and impossible prison escapes, he spent roughly half his life in jail. He never killed anyone during a job, but was rueful about the wreckage that spread across his professional and private dealings - "I guess I put the kiss of death on them all." After Arnold Schuster, the young clothing clerk who recognized him on the subway, was murdered, Sutton claimed he had no advance knowledge of the hit, but the crime was never solved. "When it comes to analyzing myself," he ventured, "I only know the questions. I don't know the answers." In "Sutton," his sentimental novel about the enigmatic boxman, J.R. Moehringer summons the essential markers of his subject's fabled sprees, starting with his hardscrabble boyhood in Irishtown, by the Brooklyn Navy Yard (Sutton was born in 1901), and concluding with his parole from Attica on Christmas Eve 1969. Moehringer tracks Sutton's early disastrous tapping of a shipyard safe and his apprenticeship to a stylish Manhattan master safecracker, as well as some of his familiar heists - the First National Bank of Ozone Park, the J. Rosenthal & Son jewelry store and the Manufacturers Trust Company. He follows Sutton into Sing Sing, where he toils in a rose garden maintained by Charles Chapin, a New York Evening World editor incarcerated for killing his wife, and into Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary, where Sutton works as secretary to the prison shrink. Moehringer inventories Sutton's obsessive, if mainly doomed, breakouts: from Sing Sing by picking locks and from Eastern State, first through a sewer pipe, then after digging a tunnel, and later from Holmesburg, when he steals a guard's uniform. There are illustrious walk-ons - the Sing Sing warden Lewis Lawes, the mobsters Dutch Schultz and Joey Gallo. Moehringer develops the novel as a tense progression of flashbacks, each episode triggered as Sutton escorts a reporter and a photographer (here merely tagged "Reporter" and "Photographer," but most likely based on Ed Kirkman and Gordon Rynders of The Daily News) on a tour of his old New York City haunts - meetings, heists, amorous interludes - on the Christmas morning after his release from Attica. This structure prompts a rapt contrast between Sutton's nostalgic reveries and his taciturn, vacant present. Yet in nearly every scene, Moehringer slights the contrarieties, surprises and weirdness of Willie the Actor's life in favor of a tired rich girl/poor boy tragedy of thwarted love. Any move or gesture, however mysterious or ordinary, across Sutton's sinuous trajectory turns out to have been intended to win - and then win back - Bess Endner, the pixieish daughter of a shipbuilding magnate who kept the lovers apart. As Moehringer invokes Sutton's enchantment late in the novel: "He's in 1919, with Bess. He's never really been anywhere else." By bringing Bess to the foreground, Moehringer cleverly elaborates the residue of angry yearning in the bank robber's memoirs toward the woman he variously called Bessie Hurley and Carrie Wagner. "I never saw Bessie again," he confided in one book, but "I dreamed about her a lot"; and in the other: "I never saw her again. Nor did I particularly want to." But the Willie and Bess of "Sutton" come so enmeshed in romantic and period cliché that the result is something like a cinematic double exposure, overlaying a Lifetime Movie Network "Pick-A-Flick" onto William Wellman's "Public Enemy." Here they fall in love: "Willie looks at Bess. Her eyes - pools of blue and gold. He feels the earth tip toward the moon. He leans, touches his lips softly to hers. His skin tingles, his blood catches fire. In this instant, he knows, in this unforeseen gift of a moment, his future is being reshaped." They archly banter and spoon politics: "'You certainly do have strong opinions,' Willie says. "'Don't you think it a shame I can't express them at the ballot box?' '"Oh, well, women will have the vote soon enough.' "'Tomorrow would not be soon enough, Mr. Sutton.'" And here, years later, Willie conjures Bess as a mermaid: "She's wearing a sundress, green and blue, form-fitting, like a tail fin. She looks as if she rode the moon out of the sea." "Sutton" settles for stock footage. The longhaired Photographer who joins Sutton on his Christmas journey into the past talks like Cheech to Chong: "This guy's been fighting the Man for decades." Sutton encounters a one-armed heart-of-gold prostitute named (what else?) Wingy. Moehringer, a gifted reporter and the author of a well-regarded memoir, "The Tender Bar," often establishes his novel's atmosphere journalistically, through shorthand context and data. "Mailer, Nixon, Manson, the Zodiac Killer, the cops - it's 1969, man. Year of the Power Trip." When the plot demands physical description, Sutton conveniently is near a three-way mirror. If a reader might benefit from his back story, members of the press gathered outside Attica summarize his legend. When Sutton proves too reticent, the Reporter holds his clip files handy. In case we forgot the pathos, there is the prison psychiatrist to remind us, "The alienation from the mother and father, the sibling abuse, the grim poverty of your early years . . . it all created an uncommonly dangerous and potent witches' brew." Moehringer scatters hints of what might have been a darker, bolder book. Harderedged (as when Happy Johnston, Sutton's young accomplice, requests "a turn" with Bess after she passes out on a bed) and self-reflexive (an exchange with Bess's granddaughter suggests Sutton may be addled, the story we're reading all wrong). Still, "Sutton" winds down to a rote epiphany about the safecracker as "a walking embodiment of America" and, incredibly, another mermaid fantasy. In Florida after Sutton's death, the Reporter discovers Weeki Wachee Springs State Park, in a town that calls itself "The Only City of Live Mermaids," and goes backstage to interview a Bess Endner look-alike: "She too is wearing a fabric fin. Skintight. Gold-specked. She sashays toward Reporter, smiling. Reporter knows, he sees it in her blue eyes. . . . She'll say Reporter's name, and Reporter will ask how she knows his name, and she'll say, Willie - he had a hunch you'd be stopping by. Then she and Reporter will go for coffee, and discover a thousand things in common, and eventually fall in love, and get married, and have babies, and their life together will be Willie's everlasting gift to Reporter. He can see it all." So that's it? Could the whole sugary fiction be the fever dream of a lonely, sensitive Reporter steeped in vintage Hollywood? Now, that "Sutton" might have gone someplace. 'I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it,' Sutton confessed, 'than at any other time in my life.' Robert Polito is, most recently, the editor of the Library of America volume "David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s" and the author of a poetry collection, "Hollywood & God." He directs the writing program at the New School.
Library Journal Review
Moehringer offers a fictionalized biography of gentleman bank robber and accomplished prison escape artist Willie Sutton, one of the most famous criminals of the early 20th century. The author appreciates the contradictions and conflicts in the contemporary accounts of Sutton as well as in the subject's own autobiographies. With a mix of fact and imagination, the listener is drawn into Willie's life of love and passion, hard time served, and hard choices. The literary device of a lifetime recalled in a day flows well, as does the husky narration by Dylan Baker, who infuses the presentation with just the right level of Brooklyn accent. VERDICT For crime, biography, and historical fiction fans. ["History lovers will enjoy this fictional biography of a modern icon of crime," read the review of the Hyperion hc, LJ 8/12.-Ed.]-J. Sara Paulk, Wythe-Grayson Reg. Lib., -Independence, VA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.