Ragged Dick

by Neal Bell

Journalist Dick Hunter sets out to document the slums of 1890’s New York where he discovers harrowing conditions of poverty and abuse. “Neal Bell’s play RAGGED DICK is a lurid, poetic and often fascinating study of sex, politics and poverty. …Bell’s landscape painting of urban poverty does not take the form of any ordinary docudrama. Rather, it offers a caustic, stylized impressionistic vision—a kind of film noir for the pre-ragtime era reminiscent of novelist E L Doctorow’s work… In RAGGED DICK, Bell looks straight in the eye of everything that can breed in a venereal disease, ravaged babies, corrupt and brutal cops, child abuse, warped sex and shattered souls of all descriptions. And he describes it all in startlingly original terms.”Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times

116 pages, Paperback

Published December 15, 2016

About the author

Neal Bell is an American playwright and screenwriter. Bell has written such plays as the thriller Two Small Bodies, as well as co-writing the screenplay for the Two Small Bodies film adaptation.

Bell has written other plays such as On the Bum, Somewhere in the Pacific, Monster, Operation Midnight Climax, Therese Raquin and Spatter Pattern (Or, How I Got Away With It).