Historical Fiction · HopefulTwo cousins create a comic-book superhero in 1939 Brooklyn
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Two cousins in Brooklyn create a comic-book superhero in 1939
In New York in 1939, Joe Kavalier, a young escape artist and aspiring magician from Prague, moves in with his cousin Sammy Clay in Brooklyn. Sammy wants to profit from the comic book boom, and together they create The Escapist, an anti-fascist superhero. Their work takes them from Brooklyn to the top of the Empire State Building.
More about this book
Who
Josef "Joe" Kavalier, a nineteen-year-old Czech artist and trained escape artist who arrives in New York as a refugee from Nazi-occupied Prague, and his seventeen-year-old cousin, Sammy Klayman, an aspiring writer in Brooklyn. Joe's main concern is to rescue the family he left behind.
World
New York City in 1939, during the comic-book boom.
What makes it different
Together the cousins create The Escapist, an anti-fascist superhero, while their employer, Empire Novelty, keeps most of the money. Many events echo the lives of real comic-book creators, including Jack Kirby, to whom the book is dedicated, Joe Shuster, Jerry Siegel, Stan Lee and Will Eisner, and the story roughly follows the Golden Age of Comics.
Feel
Historical fiction of 639 pages. It won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and later reached the stage in Seattle in 2014 and the Metropolitan Opera in 2025.