Aladdin & Co.: A Romance of Yankee Magic by Herbert Quick

Description

Every boom town needs a dreamer with sharper elbows than the next man, and Lattimore has Jim Elkins, a cheerful speculator who believes money is a substance that can be conjured out of confidence alone. His partner and storyteller watches, half horrified and half delighted, as mortgages turn into railroads, a nobody town drags itself onto the map, and the men who keep the West solvent sit up and take notice of this Yankee magic.

The sorcery works, but every spell has a price of admission. Eastern capital arrives, the partnership is courted and tested, men who were yesterday’s equals remember how to wield a checkbook, and romance quietly threads through the deal-making. The crash comes not from villainy but from the good old American habit of believing one’s own prospectus, and the lesson is spun the way only a comic novel can spin it, taut as comedy first and warning second.

For readers of the American business fable

• Sympathy for sharp dealers who are honestly crooked and crookedly honest.
• Small-town civic boosterism, railroad politics and the romance of the get-rich-quick scheme.
• Herbert Quick’s generous, genial comic voice, attentive to the human cost of the dream.

About This DodaBooks Edition

The full 31 chapters are reset in comfortable type with a working index.