page_title: A Contract with God
section_title: Content and plot summaries
hierarchical_section_title: A Contract with God / Content and plot summaries
context_page_description: A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories is a graphic novel by American cartoonist Will Eisner published in 1978. The book's short story cycle revolves around poor Jewish characters who live in a tenement in New York City. Eisner produced two sequels set in the same tenement: A Life Force in 1988, and Dropsie Avenue in 1995. Though the term "graphic novel" did not originate with Eisner, the book is credited with popularizing its use.
  Four stand-alone stories make up the book: in "A Contract with God" a religious man gives up his faith after the death of his young adopted daughter; in "The Street Singer" a has-been diva tries to seduce a poor, young street singer, who tries to take advantage of her in turn; a bullying racist is led to suicide after false accusations of pedophilia in "The Super"; and "Cookalein" intertwines the stories of several characters vacationing in the Catskill Mountains. The stories are thematically linked with motifs of frustration, disillusionment, violence, and issues of ethnic identity.
context_section_description: A Contract with God mixes melodrama with social realism.  Following an author's introduction, "A Tenement in the Bronx", the book contains four stories set in a tenement building; they derive in part from Eisner's personal memories growing up in a tenement in the Bronx.  With A Contract with God he aimed to explore an area of Jewish-American history that he felt was underdocumented, while showing that comics was capable of mature literary expression, at a time when it received little such regard as an artistic medium.  In the preface he stated his aim to keep the exaggeration in his cartooning within realistic limits.
  The story "A Contract with God" drew from Eisner's feelings over the death at sixteen of his daughter Alice.  In his introduction to the 2006 edition of the book, Eisner first wrote about it and the feelings he felt toward God that were reflected in the story.  "The Street Singer" and "The Super" are fiction, but sprang from Eisner's memories of people he had met in the tenements of his youth.  "Cookalein" was the most autobiographical—the main character "Willie" even carries Eisner's own boyhood nickname.  Eisner remarked that "it took a lot of determination, a kind of courage, to write that story".
  The stories' sexual content is prominent, though not in the gratuitous manner of underground comix' celebration of hedonism, which contrasted with the conservative lifestyle of Eisner the middle-aged businessman.  Eisner used no profanity in the book, and according to critic Josh Lambert the sex in Contract is not so much erotic as disturbing, the characters frustrated or filled with guilt.
caption: Stories derive from Will Eisner's memories of his childhood in tenement buildings in the Bronx.
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