Norman Duncan's First Short Story Cycle,The Soul of the Street: Correlated Stories of the New York Syrian Quarter

Norman Duncan (1871–1916) is best known as the Canadian expatriate author of adventure stories set in the fishing ports of Newfoundland at the turn of the last century. But Duncan, who was at the time a journalist in New York, began his career as a fiction writer in quite different territory. His first book was the mostly forgotten short story cycle The Soul of the Street: Correlated Stories of the New York Syrian Quarter (1900). In providing analysis of that book's cyclical structure and sociopolitical themes, the present essay shows that The Soul of the Street deserves to be better known for comprehensive literary-historical, political-cultural, and aesthetic reasons that should continue, some hundred years after its publication, to have an engaging, and indeed an increasing, relevance for our multicultural urban world.