Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Looking for Jimmy | 2007 | Peter Quinn | Buy |
Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America (2007) is a collection of 22 essays by Peter Quinn exploring Irish-American history, culture, and identity. Quinn is also a novelist, known for historical fiction set in New York, and this non-fiction collection draws on the same interests in Irish immigration, urban life, and American history that inform his novels.
The “Jimmy” in the title refers to a pair of archetypal Irish-American figures: James Cagney, the movie star, and James J. Walker, the Jazz Age mayor of New York. Quinn uses them as a lens to examine how the Irish immigrant experience shaped American politics, street culture, religion, and popular imagination. The essays range from personal memoir to historical investigation, and some were published previously while others appear here for the first time.
The book has been praised for its combination of storytelling and scholarship. Quinn writes about the 150-year Irish-American story with the same narrative skill he brings to his fiction, making it accessible to general readers as well as those with a specific interest in Irish-American history.