Dreams Bigger Than the Night

Paul M. Levitt is professor emeritus of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he taught modern drama, theatre history, and the gangster novel. He has written more than twenty books (five of them novels), radio plays for the BBC, books about medicine, stories for children, and numerous scholarly and popular articles. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

What a startling novel! Few writers can bring off a book like this—and with such a distinct voice. Facing one of the most difficult challenges that novelists can set themselves, drawing on real events and characters from life, Paul Levitt weaves an enthralling page-turner that manages to contain huge metaphor and elegant ideas. Confirming our suspicions about villains, understanding lesser folk who fight the odds, Dreams Bigger Than the Night becomes, within the first pages, writing bigger than the spirit, and in its relentless but always perceptive drive forward, answers the question: ‘is plot character or is character plot?’ This is just excellent writing, where we ‘see’ everybody and turn with every twist.