Seven novels that tell the story of NYC's Gilded Age

Simon Baatz is a New York Times-bestselling author and award-winning historian.

His latest book is The Girl on the Velvet Swing: Sex, Murder, and Madness at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century.

At CrimeReads Baatz tagged seven novels that tell the story of Gilded Age New York City, including:

James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)

Johnson, an editor at the New York Age, a weekly newspaper based in New York, wrote this fictional account of a young biracial man who moves from Georgia to New York sometime after the Civil War. The protagonist earns his living playing ragtime at clubs and private parties, then moves to Paris, and returns to the United States where he witnesses a lynching. He is able to pass as white and he marries a white woman, abandoning his calling as a musician and going into business.

Read about another entry on the list.

Also see Rosemary Simpson's six favorite historical crime novels set during The Gilded Age.

--Marshal Zeringue