The Bold Saboteurs: A Novel

Chandler Brossard

Jun 2015 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

A “startling, terrifying” novel about a troubled young street thief in the gritty Washington, DC, of the thirties and forties (Houston Post).

At the park where the outcasts of Washington, DC, gather, everyone calls him Yogi. Although only a boy, he steals like a man, taking jewelry and money from wherever and whomever he can. When he’s flush, Yogi spends like a prince, eating beef stew and wasting whole afternoons at the cinema. When he’s broke, he looks for someone else to rob.
 
At home, Yogi goes by his real name: George Brown. With their violent, alcoholic father absent for long periods of time and their mother too brittle to cope, George and his older brother learn to fend for themselves. Roland becomes a security guard while George turns to a life of crime. But to survive among the prostitutes, muggers, and extortionists who prowl the streets of the nation’s capital, a young man must always have his wits about him, and Yogi/George is prone to schizophrenic hallucinations. When he is locked up in jail for a night and experiences his most vivid delusion yet, he fears that the line between sanity and insanity has become permanently blurred.
 
Brilliantly fusing hard-edged realism and surrealistic flights of fantasy, The Bold Saboteurs is a highly original work of art from the groundbreaking author of Who Walk in Darkness. 

About the author

Chandler Brossard (1922–1993) was an American novelist, editor, playwright, and poet. Born in Idaho Falls, Idaho, he grew up in Washington, DC, where he left school at an early age and educated himself by reading the literary classics. At eighteen, he was hired by the Washington Post as a copy boy. He became a reporter and moved to New York City, where he wrote for the New Yorker and held senior editorial positions at Time, Coronet, the American Mercury, and Look magazine. Encouraged to write fiction by the New Yorker editor William Shawn, Brossard published his debut novel, Who Walk in Darkness, in 1952. Set in contemporary Greenwich Village, it is considered by many to be the first Beat novel, although Brossard rejected that categorization. Over the course of a forty-year career, he wrote or edited seventeen books, including the groundbreaking novels The Bold Saboteurs (1953) and The Double View (1960), and taught at numerous universities in the United States and abroad, among them SUNY College at Old Westbury on Long Island, the University of Birmingham in England, the New School for Social Research in New York City, and Schiller International University in Paris.