Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

Author(s): Kathleen Rooney

Location(s): Manhattan

Genre(s): Fiction

Era(s): 20th Century

Location

Content

She took 1930s New York by storm, working her way up writing copy for Macy’s department store to become the highest paid advertising woman in the world.

Now it s the last night of 1984 and Lillian, 85 years old but just as sharp as ever, is on her way to a party. It’s chilly enough for her mink coat and Manhattan is grittier but the quick-tongued poet has never been one to scare easily. On a walk that takes her over 10 miles around the city, she meets bartenders, shopkeepers, criminals, parents, and parents-to-be, while reviewing a life of excitement and adversity, passion and heartbreak, illuminating all the ways New York has changed – and endured.

A love letter to city life in all its guts and grandeur, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk paints a portrait of a remarkable woman across the canvas of a changing America: from the Jazz Age to the onset of the AIDS epidemic; the Great Depression to the birth of hip-hop.

Based on the life of Margaret Fishback, a protofeminist and pioneering ad woman.

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