One Man's Mirror

New York had A. J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell. Chicago had Mike Royko and Ben Hecht. Baltimore had the incomparable H. L. Mencken. But none of them did for their cities what S. J. Kelly did for his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. Between 1935 and 1948 he wrote 850,000 words in his "Cleveland Plain Dealer" column, which, taken together, comprise a virtual diary of the city as he remembered it between 1870 and the 1940s. "One Man's Mirror," a collection of Kelly's best work, provides a veritable time trip back to Cleveland's fabled past. He knew everybody, his range of interests was encyclopediac and he had an uncanny penchant for just being around when newsworthy events occurred. If you want to know that city looked like, smelled like, sounded like and felt like, say between 1870 and 1920, Kelly will take you there. You may think you know Cleveland, but you'll never look at the city with the same eyes after reading S. J. Kelly.