’"What a fascinating, revealing episode in the history of the US this book uncovers! More than a century before the appearance of Superman, the solitary Night Hawk fought heroic battles on the nocturnal streets of Philadelphia in the interests of the oppressed. In a book that speaks to the politics as well as the popular culture of our own troubled times, Matthew Warner Osborn has reconstructed the career of this fantastical character with both forensic care and an infectious sense of intellectual excitement. If each epoch dreams up the superhero for which it is secretly desperate, perhaps the radically egalitarian Night Hawk’s time has come again."

 

Matthew Beaumont, author of 'Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London'