The Bag — Sol Yurick

Surrealism in the Urban Jungle

The Bag is , among other things, the story of Sam Miller--novelist, former professor, former idealist jolted into feelings of apocalypse by political and social upheavals. Miller's new novel, which he considers a horror, is greeted as a tour de force by his publishers. Indignantly, he retrieves his manuscript and retreats to an anonymous job in the New York City Welfare Department, and to a sleazy furnished room.

But THE BAG is also a story of a city and its people. For Sam's experiences in New York's Welfare Department throw him into an urban maelstrom: black nationalists, slumlords, pushers and addicts, liberals and business...the power-hungry and the powerless.