Written in the late 1920s and suppressed by respectable taste almost on arrival, The Wild Party is a book-length narrative poem about one night of drink, sex, jealousy and escalating violence among the vaudeville demi-monde.

It is in fact, the book that William S. Burrough's said made him want to write. The plot circles Queenie and Burrs—dancer and clown, lovers in the loosest and most combustible sense—throw a party populated by gangsters, performers, addicts and professional disasters. March drives the whole thing forward in hard, syncopated couplets: part jazz rhythm, part tabloid report, part nursery rhyme developed under morally suspicious conditions.

The poem is a Jazz Age artefact without the polished melancholy usually sold under that label. Its world is sweaty, comic, sordid and genuinely dangerous; pleasure and brutality share a wall and complain about the noise. First published in a limited edition in 1928, it became an underground influence rather than a conventional literary success, admired in particular for the way its slang, metre and cinematic cutting produce momentum almost independently of plot.

Art Spiegelman’s illustrated edition restores the poem as a designed object. His black-and-white drawings do not simply decorate March’s scenes: they interrupt, frame and accelerate them, drawing from woodcuts, silent cinema, pulp illustration and the grotesque elasticity of cartoons. 

First Pantheon edition, 1994. Hardback with drawings by Art Spiegelman. Dust jacket heavily edgeworn with creasing, rubbing and small chips and tears, particularly at the corners and spine ends; internally clean and strongly presented.