Brain Guy / Plunder

Two modern classics from the pen of New York City author Benjamin Appel, the first a story of a small time hoodlum on the rise, the second an expose of the economic rape of the Philippines by GI opportunists after the end of WWII.

Benjamin Appel was born in 1907 in New York City and grew up in Hell's Kitchen. He began writing short stories and was published in both literary and slick magazines. Brain Guy was his first novel, followed by fifteen others. In 1945 and 1946 he was sent as historian/journalist with the McNutt Mission to the Philippines. Returning to the States, he moved to Roosevelt, New Jersey, a New Deal resettlement town, where he lived with his wife and three daughters and wrote both fiction and nonfiction until he died in 1977.