What do you think?
Rate this book
The Future Mr. Dolan
Leather Binding on Spine and Corners with Golden Leaf Printing on round Spine (extra customization on request like complete leather, Golden Screen printing in Front, Color Leather, Colored book etc.) Reprinted in 2022 with the help of original edition published long back [1948]. This book is printed in black & white, sewing binding for longer life, Printed on high quality Paper, re-sized as per Current standards, professionally processed without changing its contents. As these are old books, we processed each page manually and make them readable but in some cases some pages which are blur or missing or black spots. If it is multi volume set, then it is only single volume, if you wish to order a specific or all the volumes you may contact us. We expect that you will understand our compulsion in these books. We found this book important for the readers who want to know more about our old treasure so we brought it back to the shelves. Hope you will like it and give your comments and suggestions. - English, Pages 362. EXTRA 10 DAYS APART FROM THE NORMAL SHIPPING PERIOD WILL BE REQUIRED FOR LEATHER BOUND BOOKS. COMPLETE LEATHER WILL COST YOU EXTRA US$ 25 APART FROM THE LEATHER BOUND BOOKS. {FOLIO EDITION IS ALSO AVAILABLE.} Complete The future Mister Dolan : a novel by Charles Gorham. 1948 Gorham, Charles, -.
324 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1949
About the author
Charles Gorham
21 books2 followersCharles Orson Gorham, who write “Wine of Life,” a novel about Balzac, and “The Gold of Their Bodies,” about Gauguin, died Friday of spinal meningitis at Yale‐New Haven Hospital. He was 66 years old and lived in Westport, Conn.
Mr. Gorham Pact been a publicity director for the Doubleday Doran publishing house before serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force and thp Eighth Air Force in World War IL He flew 63 missions as navigator and received the Distinguished Flying Cross.
After the war he wrote his first novel, “The Gilded Hearse,” a satire on the publishing business.
His later books included “The Future Mr. Dolan,”, “Trial by Darkness,” “Carlotta McBride” and “Martha Crane.” Mr. Gorham was a former director of the Authors League.
Surviving are his widow, Ethel; a son, John, two daughters, Deborah and Abigail; a brother, James, and grandchild.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 4, 2025
Gorham’s “The Future Mister Dolan” is a brutal counterpoint to the notion that everyone who fought in World War II came back, married their high school sweetheart, and moved out to the suburbs where they lived an Ozzie and Harriet life. The title is an odd joke when you realize Mattie Dolan never had a future and never will have one. The covers of both Pyramid editions, after reading the book, can only be viewed as predatory. In one, the Rudi Nappi artwork, Dolan is threateningly leaning over a young sixteen-year-old Gina. In the other, the Ernest Chiriacka cover, don’t be fooled and think Gina is a willing participant with three men leering over her bed.
In the end, the reader will not be enamored of Mattie Dolan, who is just about as awful as it comes. The book is well-written, but if you were to take fault with it, the lack of a rise and fall story arc stands out. Dolan is never going anywhere. He is never going to be somebody. Kill or Be Killed remains his philosophy and, to him, the city is a jungle and everybody out there is as predatory as he is or they should be to avoid being eaten up by the more carnivorous beasts out there.
As the story opens, Dolan has been released from military duty and is making his way home, but home is not necessarily anything to look forward to. He tell us: “I could feel New York as soon as the train left Newark. Outside, through the dusty window, the Jersey Meadows were rolling by, a million acres of salt marsh with dirty grass as tall as your chin, black with soot from the trains going by, thick cattails that looked like hot dogs sticking up along the edges of streams that wandered through the marshes. It is a mean approach to the City.” Home to him is East Yorkville and the first thing he does is belly up to the bar in Greene’s Saloon. His two drinking buddies are there because where else would they be. He affectionately calls one Murph and the other “the Wop.” Dolan, as we learn throughout the novel, has it in for everyone who has a different ethnicity than him and the language he uses might make a reader uncomfortable.
But with the war over, he comes home and no one seems to really give a damn. He walks in his parents’ home and his mother barely offers a greeting except to ask when his separation pay is coming in. Dolan goes to the aircraft plant he had worked in before being called up, but is told that there is no job for him. After all, he was replacing the previous guy called up who replaced the previous guy called up and so on. And, then he finds out that all the girls he knew in high school are now married and thus unavailable to date.
He decides he is going to finish high school as a nineteen-year-old, but fits in oddly, being warned by the principal as he enrolls to keep his hands off the innocent fifteen-year-olds as they have already had 38 pregnancies that year and can’t afford to lose any more young girls. He joins the football team again, but this time as a fully grown nineteen-year-old pitted against fifteen and sixteen year olds. He claims he plays by the rules, but when he takes down an opposing player so hard that the opposing player’s back breaks and is left with a fifty-fifty chance of survival, the whole team turns on him and the school kicks him out.
Dolan with his two drinking buddies turn to a life of petty crime, beating up strangers in the subway for their money and robbing bars. Dolan also allows himself to be picked up by a homosexual artist, who offers to show Dolan “blue movies,” but is robbed blind when he turns his back on Dolan.
Dolan’s most disgraceful stunts are when he decides to romance a fifteen-year-old virginal Gina who hero-worshipped her brother’s teammate three years earlier and had a scrapbook filled with Dolan’s previous football exploits. He seems at first to have a long-term relationship with Gina, who admittedly is a little slow, but quickly turns to making barroom bets that he could score with her three weeks after she turns sixteen, slaps her around, and refers to her as tramp once he has had her. Gina’s mother hoped she would finish school, but she ends up spending afternoons ditching school and in bed with Dolan. The worst comes as he tries to force her into an abortion when she turns up pregnant and then, determined not to be forced into marrying her, conceives of a plan whereby she couldn’t claim to know who the father really was if he had a drunken party with his friends and her as the guest of honor.
Gorham writes well and the novel is easy to read. He creates an unforgettable character in Dolan, who stalks the city like a predatory animal, taking to heart the theme of kill or be killed. Dolan, however, is a character for whom there is no redemption. He never sees the error of his ways and never feels guilt. He feels bitter returning to civilian society, expecting to be offered a job, a wife, a life, but does not want any of it when it is actually offered to him.
In the end, the reader will not be enamored of Mattie Dolan, who is just about as awful as it comes. The book is well-written, but if you were to take fault with it, the lack of a rise and fall story arc stands out. Dolan is never going anywhere. He is never going to be somebody. Kill or Be Killed remains his philosophy and, to him, the city is a jungle and everybody out there is as predatory as he is or they should be to avoid being eaten up by the more carnivorous beasts out there.
As the story opens, Dolan has been released from military duty and is making his way home, but home is not necessarily anything to look forward to. He tell us: “I could feel New York as soon as the train left Newark. Outside, through the dusty window, the Jersey Meadows were rolling by, a million acres of salt marsh with dirty grass as tall as your chin, black with soot from the trains going by, thick cattails that looked like hot dogs sticking up along the edges of streams that wandered through the marshes. It is a mean approach to the City.” Home to him is East Yorkville and the first thing he does is belly up to the bar in Greene’s Saloon. His two drinking buddies are there because where else would they be. He affectionately calls one Murph and the other “the Wop.” Dolan, as we learn throughout the novel, has it in for everyone who has a different ethnicity than him and the language he uses might make a reader uncomfortable.
But with the war over, he comes home and no one seems to really give a damn. He walks in his parents’ home and his mother barely offers a greeting except to ask when his separation pay is coming in. Dolan goes to the aircraft plant he had worked in before being called up, but is told that there is no job for him. After all, he was replacing the previous guy called up who replaced the previous guy called up and so on. And, then he finds out that all the girls he knew in high school are now married and thus unavailable to date.
He decides he is going to finish high school as a nineteen-year-old, but fits in oddly, being warned by the principal as he enrolls to keep his hands off the innocent fifteen-year-olds as they have already had 38 pregnancies that year and can’t afford to lose any more young girls. He joins the football team again, but this time as a fully grown nineteen-year-old pitted against fifteen and sixteen year olds. He claims he plays by the rules, but when he takes down an opposing player so hard that the opposing player’s back breaks and is left with a fifty-fifty chance of survival, the whole team turns on him and the school kicks him out.
Dolan with his two drinking buddies turn to a life of petty crime, beating up strangers in the subway for their money and robbing bars. Dolan also allows himself to be picked up by a homosexual artist, who offers to show Dolan “blue movies,” but is robbed blind when he turns his back on Dolan.
Dolan’s most disgraceful stunts are when he decides to romance a fifteen-year-old virginal Gina who hero-worshipped her brother’s teammate three years earlier and had a scrapbook filled with Dolan’s previous football exploits. He seems at first to have a long-term relationship with Gina, who admittedly is a little slow, but quickly turns to making barroom bets that he could score with her three weeks after she turns sixteen, slaps her around, and refers to her as tramp once he has had her. Gina’s mother hoped she would finish school, but she ends up spending afternoons ditching school and in bed with Dolan. The worst comes as he tries to force her into an abortion when she turns up pregnant and then, determined not to be forced into marrying her, conceives of a plan whereby she couldn’t claim to know who the father really was if he had a drunken party with his friends and her as the guest of honor.
Gorham writes well and the novel is easy to read. He creates an unforgettable character in Dolan, who stalks the city like a predatory animal, taking to heart the theme of kill or be killed. Dolan, however, is a character for whom there is no redemption. He never sees the error of his ways and never feels guilt. He feels bitter returning to civilian society, expecting to be offered a job, a wife, a life, but does not want any of it when it is actually offered to him.
August 3, 2025
The quality of the writing was a cut above what I expect from a book with 35 cents printed on its paper cover. The author put the stink of East Yorkville in my nose and filled my ears with tough-talk.
This book is filled with many insightful rants on how not to be a sucker/chump/loser. The subject of this case study is Mattie Dolan, 19 and fresh from WWII. Mattie has more brains and nerve than the other neighborhood slobs. He also has an instinct for evil. This seemed like a 1940s version of Midnight Cowboy (the movie) where Ratso and Joe Buck were combined into one character.
This book is filled with many insightful rants on how not to be a sucker/chump/loser. The subject of this case study is Mattie Dolan, 19 and fresh from WWII. Mattie has more brains and nerve than the other neighborhood slobs. He also has an instinct for evil. This seemed like a 1940s version of Midnight Cowboy (the movie) where Ratso and Joe Buck were combined into one character.
August 27, 2017
Read this for my job, as I was doing a final edit on it before we put it out in e-book form (probably in THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL MEGAPACK).
This is a brutal, uncompromising novel about young Matthew Dolan, 19, just returned from the War and prowling his old Manhattan neighborhood. Mattie is cynical, cold, calculating and unhappy with his lot in life. His dad drives a hack, his mom is a drunk, his brother Rusty is more dedicated (than Matt can make himself interested in) to advancing himself. Mattie's friends are all dead-end kids his own age, pulling petty crimes, bumming around, boozing it up and generally wasting time. Mattie's only view of a future he can stomach comes from the influence of his Uncle Frank, who made good with some black marketeering during the war and spun that money into semi-respectable business endeavors, fleecing the suckers and making good cash. The book covers a span from late 1946 to 1947.
Interestingly, there are very few social psychology excuses given for Mattie - while not a full blown sociopath in the serial killer sense, he certainly is one in the "do anything for a buck" American businessman sense - he's basically a narcissist who appreciates nothing and no one and wants whatever he can take, as quickly as he can take it. He begins a relationship with 16-year old Gina, exploiting her attraction to him just so that he can take advantage of her (a particular plot thread that ends horrifically). But Mattie doesn't care because Mattie doesn't care about anything or anyone - need a car, steal one. Need money, watch your doofus friends botch their poorly planned heist and go pick up the money they hid as they go to the clink. Complain about your drunk old mom but slip her money to keep her boozed up and out of your hair. Allow yourself to be taken home by a homosexual so you can rob him blind. Get hired by a wealthy socialite to start a riot playing fake Communists at a meeting of Democrats, landing your own brother in hot water. Watch your beloved corrupt businessman Uncle get gunned down in the street and completely fail to learn the lesson. That's Mattie all over.
I thought this was a pretty good book. A bit overwritten at times, a bit meandering, but it's always interesting to read books written about and during earlier time periods (which tend to get nostalgized - no BOWERY BOYS here!) that try to realistically capture the underside of the lived experience, while not succumbing completely to trendy, of-the-time political/social/literary concerns and neither to genre digressions (there are no cop shoot-outs from noir fiction, nor any of the nihilistic philosophical digressions of Cornell Woolrich, or even much stereotypical tough guy talk). All the characters are human beings, with believable personas and backgrounds. Some good, some flawed. And at the center of it all is the moral black hole of Matthew Dolan, trying to figure out how to become the person he wants to be (hence the title), regardless of who he has to step on to get there. In a way, Mattie strikes me as an early example of our modern corporate CEOS, willing to destroy, betray and exploit anyone for their own profit, but essentially small people at heart, with small, petty dreams. And the ending of the book is surprisingly in tune with that observation, as Mattie has learned no lessons and sets out to make his mark in the world. And you know he'll succeed.
Some of the most engaging bits come in the details - the experience of WWII veterans who only fought for a short time before the war was over (Mattie was drafted in June, 1945), the widespread corruption and political machinations, the oddly frank detour into the gay, Greenwhich Village underworld of the time (nothing explicit, but a well-done glimpse of bars and Turkish baths), the casual misogyny of the time (Mattie hates Gina more than he ever seems to have any love for her, and women are routinely slapped around for minor infractions - Matt seems to have learned this from his father, who routinely beats their drunken mother, but the sons barely care), a high-spending tear in Miami (with Mattie incapable of seeing how lonely his Uncle's life is), a visit to an abortionist, and the casual cruising approaches of men and women of the time looking for sexual partners - all show up here in a non-lurid, matter-of-fact way. So, nothing earth shaking but if you are interested in an unvarnished, if slightly curdled, snapshot of the time and the place, it should fit the bill.
This is a brutal, uncompromising novel about young Matthew Dolan, 19, just returned from the War and prowling his old Manhattan neighborhood. Mattie is cynical, cold, calculating and unhappy with his lot in life. His dad drives a hack, his mom is a drunk, his brother Rusty is more dedicated (than Matt can make himself interested in) to advancing himself. Mattie's friends are all dead-end kids his own age, pulling petty crimes, bumming around, boozing it up and generally wasting time. Mattie's only view of a future he can stomach comes from the influence of his Uncle Frank, who made good with some black marketeering during the war and spun that money into semi-respectable business endeavors, fleecing the suckers and making good cash. The book covers a span from late 1946 to 1947.
Interestingly, there are very few social psychology excuses given for Mattie - while not a full blown sociopath in the serial killer sense, he certainly is one in the "do anything for a buck" American businessman sense - he's basically a narcissist who appreciates nothing and no one and wants whatever he can take, as quickly as he can take it. He begins a relationship with 16-year old Gina, exploiting her attraction to him just so that he can take advantage of her (a particular plot thread that ends horrifically). But Mattie doesn't care because Mattie doesn't care about anything or anyone - need a car, steal one. Need money, watch your doofus friends botch their poorly planned heist and go pick up the money they hid as they go to the clink. Complain about your drunk old mom but slip her money to keep her boozed up and out of your hair. Allow yourself to be taken home by a homosexual so you can rob him blind. Get hired by a wealthy socialite to start a riot playing fake Communists at a meeting of Democrats, landing your own brother in hot water. Watch your beloved corrupt businessman Uncle get gunned down in the street and completely fail to learn the lesson. That's Mattie all over.
I thought this was a pretty good book. A bit overwritten at times, a bit meandering, but it's always interesting to read books written about and during earlier time periods (which tend to get nostalgized - no BOWERY BOYS here!) that try to realistically capture the underside of the lived experience, while not succumbing completely to trendy, of-the-time political/social/literary concerns and neither to genre digressions (there are no cop shoot-outs from noir fiction, nor any of the nihilistic philosophical digressions of Cornell Woolrich, or even much stereotypical tough guy talk). All the characters are human beings, with believable personas and backgrounds. Some good, some flawed. And at the center of it all is the moral black hole of Matthew Dolan, trying to figure out how to become the person he wants to be (hence the title), regardless of who he has to step on to get there. In a way, Mattie strikes me as an early example of our modern corporate CEOS, willing to destroy, betray and exploit anyone for their own profit, but essentially small people at heart, with small, petty dreams. And the ending of the book is surprisingly in tune with that observation, as Mattie has learned no lessons and sets out to make his mark in the world. And you know he'll succeed.
Some of the most engaging bits come in the details - the experience of WWII veterans who only fought for a short time before the war was over (Mattie was drafted in June, 1945), the widespread corruption and political machinations, the oddly frank detour into the gay, Greenwhich Village underworld of the time (nothing explicit, but a well-done glimpse of bars and Turkish baths), the casual misogyny of the time (Mattie hates Gina more than he ever seems to have any love for her, and women are routinely slapped around for minor infractions - Matt seems to have learned this from his father, who routinely beats their drunken mother, but the sons barely care), a high-spending tear in Miami (with Mattie incapable of seeing how lonely his Uncle's life is), a visit to an abortionist, and the casual cruising approaches of men and women of the time looking for sexual partners - all show up here in a non-lurid, matter-of-fact way. So, nothing earth shaking but if you are interested in an unvarnished, if slightly curdled, snapshot of the time and the place, it should fit the bill.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews