Mr. Achilles

A Greek fruit-seller in Chicago, an heiress's child who goes missing, and a man everyone in the city has walked past a thousand times without seeing. Lee taught English at Smith College; her Uncle William was loved by a generation, and this 1912 novel does the same trick — the person nobody notices turns out to be the only one who is really paying attention. Fifty-seven plates by painters such as John Sloan and George Luks catch the same unnoticed city — barrooms, street markets, tenement corners — that Lee's fruit-seller walks through.