The Contract With God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue
By Will Eisner
W W Norton & Co Inc, New York,

Beautiful Harcover Collection of Dropsie Avenue Trilogy of this wonderful semi-autobiographical graphic novel set during the Depression includes the following Graphic Novels:
A Contract with God
A Life Force
Dropsie Avenue

FINE- LIKE NEW Condition. Some minor rubbing to covers & edges from storage and handling. A tight, clean copy.

With an unparalleled eye for stories and expressive illustration. No illustrator evoked the melancholy duskiness of New York City as emotionally as Eisner.

Published quietly in 1978, Will Eisner's revolutionary literary work A Contract With God marked the invention of the modern graphic novel, took on a life of its own, and inspired a generation of "sequential artists."

Will Eisner (19172005) saw himself as "a graphic witness reporting on life, death, heartbreak, and the never-ending struggle to prevail." The publication of A Contract With God when Eisner was sixty-one proved to be a watershed moment both for him and for comic literature. It marked the birth of the modern graphic novel and the beginning of an era when serious cartoonists could be liberated from their stultifying comic-book format.
More than a quarter-century after the initial publication of A Contract With God, and in the last few months of his life, Eisner chose to combine the three fictional works he had set on Dropsie Avenue, the mythical street of his youth in Depression-era New York City.

As the dramas unfold in A Contract With God, the first book in this new trilogy, it is at 55 Dropsie Avenue where Frimme Hersh, the pious Jew, first loses his beloved daughter, then breaks his contract with his maker, and ends up as a slumlord; it is on Dropsie Avenue where a street singer, befriended by an aging diva, is so beholden to the bottle that he fails to grasp his chance for stardom; and it is there that a scheming little girl named Rosie poisons a depraved supers dog before doing in the super as well.

In the second book, A Life Force, declared by R. Crumb to be "a masterpiece," Eisner re-creates himself in his protagonist, Jacob Shtarkah, whose existential search reflected Eisners own lifelong struggle. Chronicling not only the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression but also the rise of Nazism and the spread of left-wing politics, Eisner combined the miniaturist sensibility of Henry Roth with the grand social themes of novelists such as Dos Passos and Steinbeck.

Finally, in Dropsie Avenue: The Neighborhood, Eisner graphically traces the social trajectory of this mythic avenue over four centuries, creating a sweeping panorama of the city and its waves of new residentsthe Dutch, English, Irish, Jews, African Americans, and Puerto Ricanswhose faces changed yet whose lives presented an unending "story of life, death, and resurrection."

The Contract With God Trilogy is a mesmerizing, fictional chronicle of a universal American experience and Eisner' most poignant and enduring literary legacy.
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Will Eisner

William Erwin "Will" Eisner (March 6, 1917 – January 3, 2005) was an American cartoonist, writer, and entrepreneur. He was one of the earliest cartoonists to work in the American comic book industry, and his series The Spirit (1940–1952) was noted for its experiments in content and form. In 1978, he popularized the term "graphic novel" with the publication of his book A Contract with God. He was an early contributor to formal comics studies with his book "Comics and Sequential Art" (1985). The Eisner Award was named in his honor, and is given to recognize achievements each year in the comics medium; he was one of the three inaugural inductees to the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame.
..........From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia