Cool World(1959) by Warren Miller

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Cool World (1959)

by Warren Miller

Harlem, New York City

New York: 43/105

Harlem: 9/14

  A finalist for the National Book Award in 1960, The Cool World is a literary-world rarity: A book about African American teens written by a middle aged white guy.  Hard to say what editor Susan Straight was thinking when she included The Cool World in her Harlem section- it's a book that has been largely forgotten- an author who has been largely forgotten.   I feel like Straight must have read The Cool World when she was growing up.   Straight has done a solid job covering 50's New York and the youth culture that partially emerged from that time and place.   Like many of the books set in Harlem, The Cool World is filled with characters who spend the entire book complaining about their circumstances.  

  There isn't much escape in these pages, just characters struggling, struggling, struggling to make it through.  Miller's picture of gang life in the 1950's is (relatively) benign, sure, the gang keeps an underage prostitute cooped up in their clubhouse to bang for a buck fifty, but the hardest drugs are reefer cigarettes, and the protagonist, Duke's(leader of the Crocadiles(sp)) most sacred wish is getting his hands on a working gun.  How quaint!