The Dixie Dugan Trilogy:
Show Girl / Hollywood Girl / Society
J. P. McEvoy
Introduction by Steven Moore
March 12, 2024
ISBN 9798218427245 / Hardcover / 596 pages / $39.99
ISBN 9798218353674 / Paperback / 596 pages / $29.99

Between 1928 and 1932, J. P. McEvoy published six ingenious novels told entirely through letters, telegrams, newspaper articles, ads, telephone transcriptions, scripts, playbills, greeting-card verses, interoffice memos, legal documents, monologues, song lyrics, police reports, and radio broadcasts. Three of them, collected here for the first time, chronicle the wild career of jazz baby Dixie Dugan, modeled on actress Louise Brooks, whom McEvoy knew personally.

The best-selling Show Girl follows Dixie's zigzagging path to Broadway stardom; in Hollywood Girl, she heads West for more risqué escapades and impulsively marries a wealthy playboy; and in Society, Dixie navigates the worlds of European and American high society before returning to Hollywood to resume her showbiz reign.

Beneath the novels' hellzapoppin' energy and crackling jazz-age slang, McEvoy exposes the era's darker undercurrents: sexual predation, tabloid sensationalism, political graft, the rise of religious fundamentalism, and the vapid lifestyles of the rich and famous. Yet it's the fusion of humor and bite—success and failure, ridicule and irony—shaken and stirred with linguistic and formal ingenuity that makes The Dixie Dugan Trilogy "a madcap, mordant masterpiece," as critic Steven Moore writes in his insightful introduction.

Out of print since the 1930s, these early "avant-pop" novels return at last, ready to be rediscovered by contemporary readers.