ABSTRACT

In the hotel lobbies of American film and literature one can meet (among many others) Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe and their accomplices and adversaries; a pair of hapless out-of-towners; Amory Blaine and, a few years later, Monroe Stahr; Lolita and Humbert Humbert; Roger Thornley in pursuit of George Kaplan from New York to Chicago; Emma McChesney; Hurstwood and Carrie; Michael J. Fox as the concierge, Richard Gere’s pretty woman, and the night-

clerk in the films and novel with those titles; and, perhaps most memorably, Benjamin Braddock waiting to meet Mrs Robinson.