The Prisoner of Second Avenue

Anxiety doesn't help. Mel, too, gets the ax. His wife takes a job to tide them over, then she too is sacked. As if this weren't enough, Mel is fighting a losing battle with the very environs of life

Polluted air is killing everything that grows on his terrace; the walls of the high rise apartment are paper thin, so that the private lives of a pair of German stewardesses next door are open books to him; the apartment is burgled; and his psychiatrist dies with $23,000 of his money

Mel does the only thing left for him to do; he has a nervous breakdown. It is on recovery that we come to esteem him all the more. For Mel and his wife and people like them have the resilience, the grit to survive

"A gift for taking a grave subject and, without losing sight of its basic seriousness, treating it with hearty but sympathetic humor.... A talent for writing a wonderful funny line... full of humor and intelligence... Fine fun" ~ N.Y. Post

"Creates an atmosphere of casual cataclysm, an everyday urban purgatory of copelessness from which laughter seems to be released like vapor from the city's manholes" ~ Time