Manhattan '45

This book reconstructs New York City in 1945, the year the European and Pacific wars ended and servicemen began to return. Morris describes the harbour and the liners, the midtown grid, Harlem, the immigrant neighbourhoods, and the working systems of subways, hotels, newspapers, and nightclubs. Social chapters take in money, race, entertainment, and the feel of a city that was briefly the centre of a victorious alliance. The method is panoramic reportage built from contemporary records and later recollection rather than a single memoir. It is an urban portrait of one year, not a general history of the twentieth-century United States.

Bound in grey plasticised paper, cover printed and blocked with a pink and black design by Neil Gower. Grey slipcase and endpapers.