Billy Bathgate | Characters
The title character of the novel is a boy from the East Bronx who takes his last name from a street near his home, Bathgate Avenue, which he calls "the street of plenty, the street of the fruits of the earth." Billy is very much a child of the street, and that is naturally where he looks for life and opportunity in his 1930s tenement neighborhood. He has not learned about self-reliance by reading Emerson and Thoreau; the experience of danger and temptation on the street has been his direct teacher. Billy is resourceful and daring because he needs these qualities to survive. He has to...
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