Shorty McCabe

A retired prizefighter who now trains other men for a living, Shorty McCabe narrates his own adventures in thick New York slang, telling them to an old schoolmate who has become a magazine writer. The episodes run together loosely: a chance meeting on a train with the dubious Leonidas Macklin Dodge, a turn at reviving the reluctant invalid Homer Fales, and a long stint as sparring partner and companion to an unnamed rich man known only as the Boss. That job carries Shorty well past Manhattan, to upstate farms, Bermuda, Monte Carlo and an Italian castle the Boss buys for his honeymoon. Sewell Ford published it in 1906, and the appeal is less the plot than the voice, a wisecracking vernacular that early 20th century magazine readers bought by the volume.