The Best Revenge

Sol Stein

Jul 2015 · Untreed Reads

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"It's good to be ambitious. Only remember, the nearer you get to the front of the line, the more people with knives can see your back."

That's Louie Riller giving advice to his son, Ben, who happens to be the most successful producer on Broadway. Louie Riller himself happens to be long dead.

"Joan of Arc heard voices," Ben Riller's secretary tells him. "Why shouldn't you?" But Ben isn't just hearing voices; he's having a running argument with the late Louie about life, love, and Ben's newest production, The Best Revenge, a play that has already gobbled up too much of other people's money and is in danger of closing before it opens.

When, on Louie's advice, Ben visits his father's master shylock, Aldo Manucci, we are suddenly involved with two generations of wonderful underworld characters. One of them pulls the trapdoor under Ben's feet, forcing him to choose between his moral and financial ruin.

In turn hilarious, poignant, and profound, The Best Revenge takes us on a vastly entertaining excursion behind the scenes of the Great White Way, where the drama is often more suspenseful than anything that happens onstage and where the best revenge is, of course, success.

In The Best Revenge, the author of the million-copy seller The Magician, out-triumphs all his previous work. Saul Bellow has said of The Best Revenge, “It reads itself.” And The New York Times affirms, “If you bury yourself in a Sol Stein novel while walking, you’ll walk into a wall.”

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Sol Stein is a Chicago-born transplant to the Bronx. In the 1950's he was an anti-Communist scriptwriter for the Voice of America, Washington¿s Cold War propaganda radio network, and a leading defender of civil liberties. But he made his lasting mark in publishing. In 1962 he and his wife at the time, Patricia Day, founded the publishing house Stein and Day, which had immediate success that year with the director Elia Kazan¿s debut book, America, America. The story of a Greek youth who comes to the United States, the book sold three million copies, and Mr. Kazan turned it into a movie, released the next year. Mr. Stein was Stein and Day¿s editor in chief. In one of the many books Mr. Stein himself wrote, Bankruptcy: A Feast for Lawyers (1989), he exposed the bureaucratic nightmare that had accompanied the financial implosion of Stein and Day after 27 years in business. Solomon Stein was born in Chicago on Oct. 13, 1926, to Louis and Zelda (Zam) Stein, Jewish immigrants who fled Russia. His mother became a translator for the United Nations. His father was a jewelry designer. The family moved to the North Bronx in 1930. Mr. Stein went on to enroll at City College, but his studies there were interrupted when he enlisted in the Army Air Forces in 1944. He voluntarily transferred to the infantry and served in Germany during the post-World War II occupation. After returning from military service, he completed his bachelor of social science degree and earned a master¿s in English and comparative literature at Columbia. Besides working as an anti-Communist scriptwriter for the Voice of America, Mr. Stein was a member of its ideological advisory staff starting in the early 1950s. The journalist Robert Scheer, who was editor of the left-leaning Ramparts magazine in the late 1960s, branded him The Archdeacon of the Cold War. Sol Sttein passed away on September 26, 2019 at the age of 92.