The Quaker City, Or, the Monks of Monk Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery, and Crime [Paperback]

George Lippard (Author), David S. Reynolds (Editor, Introduction)

Product Details

• Paperback: 632 pages
• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press; New edition edition (July 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0870239716
• ISBN-13: 978-0870239717
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #361,660 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

David S. Reynolds, a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is the author or editor of 15 books, including "Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America," "Walt Whitman's America," "John Brown, Abolitionist," "Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson," "George Lippard," "Faith in Fiction," and "Beneath the American Renaissance." He is the winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Christian Gauss Award, the Ambassador Book Award, the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has been interviewed some 80 times on radio and TV, on shows including NPR's "Fresh Air," "Weekend Edition," and "The Diane Rehm Show," ABC's "The John Batchelor Show," and C-SPAN's "After Words," Brian Lamb's "Book Notes," and "Book TV." He is a regular contributor to "The New York Times Book Review" and is included in "Who's Who in America," "Who's Who in American Education," and "Who's Who in the World." David Reynolds was born in Providence, Rhode Island. For much of his childhood he lived in West Barrington, Rhode Island in a home attached to the Nayatt Point Lighthouse (built in 1828). His father, Paul Reynolds, sold life insurance and later became an artist. His mother, Adelaide Koch Reynolds, was an artist, art teacher, and sometime illustrator who designed newspapers ads and Hallmark greeting cards. David Reynolds attended the Providence Country Day School, where he later taught for a year after his graduation from college. He received the B.A. magna cum laude from Amherst College and the Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught American literature and American Studies at Northwestern University, Barnard College, New York University, Rutgers University, Baruch College, and the Sorbonne-Paris III. Since 2006, he has been at the CUNY Graduate Center. Besides writing and teaching, he enjoys songwriting and tennis as hobbies.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Peculiar, Enticing Novel, April 15, 2000

By 

Arthur (Lawrence, Kansas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Quaker City, Or, the Monks of Monk Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery, and Crime (Paperback)

This is a long, sprawling, peculiar novel, but one that I always enjoy going back to. I forget, every time I reread it, how wonderful and strange an adventure it is! Lippard is a minor figure in American letters, inspired by early American masters such as Charles Brockden Brown and popular French novelists such as Eugen Sue. The Quaker City is certainly a flawed work, but it is only more human, engaging and approachable because of this fact. Lippard was no master of plot structure or narrative technique; in fact, he wasn't much of a craftsman at all, regarding the nuances and fine textures of language. However, he was a writer gifted with a dizzingly original, and sometimes grotesque, imagination. The Quaker City is the kind of book that you can't pot down, although part of you sometimes wants to. His tale of the intrigues and iniquities lurking beaneath the surface of Victorian Philadelphia will shock and amaze. I especially recommend this novel for fans of Caleb Carr, Egdar Allan Poe, and Robertson Davies.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars America's first best-seller., August 4, 2000

By 

"rodney23" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Quaker City, Or, the Monks of Monk Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery, and Crime (Paperback)

Anybody who enjoyed Matthew Lewis' 'The Monk' will appreciate George Lippard's "You ain't seen nothin' yet" style. The plot revolves around an American version of England's famous 'Hellfire Club' located in Philadelphia's Southwark region (Historians differ on rather or not 'Monk Hall' actually existed. Some claim that such a club did exist from the late 1700's until the 1820's. Other claim that the club sprang from Lippard's very fertile imagination) and features such goodies as white slavery, trap doors, and wanton booze & oyster abuse (now you know why the Republicans picked Philly for their convention). This is one wild read. Lippard once attempted to produce it as a play, but angry protesters threatened to burn down the theater. 'The Monks of Monks Hall' was America's first, real best seller. Read, no doubt, by people who kept uttering "Immoral...shocking...filth..." as they eagerly turned each page. Pick up this piece of history now.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sensationally wicked masterpiece!, August 22, 2007

By 

Carl N. Bloom (Carbondale, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Quaker City, Or, the Monks of Monk Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery, and Crime (Paperback)

A best-seller in its day, Quaker City is a violent and surreal look at the life of the citizens of Philadelphia in the 1840s. Anyone who likes Edgar Allen Poe or the Marquis de Sade will find this an interesting read; written off by critics as blatantly pulp, before such a term existed, they considered its mass appeal a sign of weakness, and by 1900, it had vanished from most lists of important American novels. I'm glad that critics are reconsidering its position, and I look forward to more of Lippard's novels coming back to print. Devil-bug, the mastermind of evil, is a great villain, and he looks ahead to Jarry's Pere Ubu, Faulkner's Popeye and many of the great surreal or superreal villains of the twentieth century.