Recommended Books & Films

While film buffs surely will want to Netflix The Philadelphia Story and Rocky (and -- why not? -- Rocky Balboa) for a taste of the glamour and grit that was and is Philadelphia, bookworms ought to sink into these tasty tomes.

Art & Architecture -- Try Philadelphia's Architecture (MIT Press, 1984), which goes into environmental issues as well, or the more coffee-table An Architectural Guidebook to Philadelphia (Gibbs Smith, 1999) by Frances Morrone and James Iska. Roslyn Brenner's Philadelphia's Outdoor Art: A Walking Tour (Camino Books, 1987) has a makeshift text but contains good photography.

Old Philadelphia in Early Photographs, 1839-1914 (Dover, 1976) by Robert F. Looney is a superb photographic history. Robert Llewellyn has also assembled a sensitive book of more recent photographs in Philadelphia (Thomasson-Grant, 1986).

Biography -- John Lukacs's Philadelphia: Patricians & Philistines 1900-1950 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981) is a charming, slightly offbeat collection of profiles of seven colorful figures who flourished during this period and have faded into obscurity since.

The Kelly family -- John, Jack, and Grace -- receives a hagiographic and slightly dated treatment in John McCallum's That Kelly Family (A. S. Barnes, 1957). Another "immigrant made good" story, although a more measured one, is the biography of former mayor Frank Rizzo, Joseph Daughen's The Cop Who Would Be King (Little, Brown; 1977). For shorter tales of the most famous "pathfinders, swashbucklers, scribblers, and sages" of the historic University of Pennsylvania, dig into Samuel Hughes's Penn in Ink (Xlibris, 2006).

Fiction -- Try Pete Dexter's God's Pocket (Warner Books, 1990) for a gritty contemporary look at the city by a former newspaper reporter turned big-league novelist and scriptwriter. Donald Zochert's Murder in the Hellfire Club (Holt, Rinehart & Winston; 1978) is an amusing historical mystery, with Colonists framed for murder in 1770s London and Ben Franklin on hand to solve the case.

History -- It is impossible to read about the transformation of the Colonies to the United States, and the first 50 years of independence, without learning about Philadelphia. Christopher and James Collier, two brothers -- one a writer on jazz, the other a history professor -- have an intensely novelistic and readable summary of the 1787 Constitutional Convention with Decision in Philadelphia (Ballantine, reissued 1987). Carl Bridenbaugh's Rebels and Gentlemen (Oxford University Press, 1965) is a good summary of events leading up to independence. Catherine Drinker Bowen's Miracle at Philadelphia (Atlantic-Little, Brown; 1960) is a vivid retelling of the 1787 Constitutional Convention.

E. Digby Baltzell's Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia (Free Press, 1960) is a thoughtful and amusing comparison between these two preeminent Colonial cities, explaining why their histories turned out so differently. Baltzell's first classic effort here was Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class (Free Press, 1958).

The transformation from ideal seaport to ideal manufacturing city is covered in Civil War Issues in Philadelphia 1856-1865 by William Dusinberre (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965).

W. E. B. Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1899) is a classic analysis of racism and its social effects in the North since the Civil War. Jean Seder has edited Voices of Another Time: 3 Memories (Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1985), three oral histories of African-American women who were born in the South but who spent their lives in Philadelphia, complete with recipes, cures, and proverbs.

Edwin Wolf II's Philadelphia: Portrait of an American City (Stackpole Books, 1975) is one of the more engaging histories, with beautiful and appropriate illustrations. The building of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, a Champs Elysées in the midst of the Colonial grid, is covered in David Bruce Brownlee's Building the City Beautiful (Philadelphia Museum of Art catalog, 1989).

From the moment 1990s mayor Ed Rendell (now governor of Pennsylvania) took office, he allowed Buzz Bissinger complete behind-the-scenes access to his ideas and meetings. Bissinger's written the best recent history of the city in A Prayer for the City: The True Story of a Mayor and Five Heroes in a Race Against Time (Random House, 1998).

Author Rich Westcott documents 100 years of Flyers, Eagles, Phils, and their predecessors -- and big-time Philadelphia fan Ed Rendell pens the foreword -- in A Century of Philadelphia Sports (Temple University Press, 2001), a must for sports history and trivia buffs.