"Made in U.S.A." [*SIGNED*]

[minor shelfwear only to book, but with a tiny piece of the spine cloth torn away at the top; the jacket is in somewhat rough shape, substantially complete but with long splits at the front hinge and rear flapfold, chipping at the upper left front panel and lower rear panel; let's just say I don't recommend removing its new mylar protective cover, since that's about all that's holding it together]. SIGNED by the author on the front endpaper. The third novel by the least-known (which is to say most-forgotten) of "The Boys in the Back Room," so dubbed by critic Edmund Wilson in his 1941 book of the same name, subtitled "Notes on California Novelists." Although linking Storm with John Steinbeck as practitioners of "more ambitious writing" (in comparison to James M. Cain, John O'Hara and William Saroyan, all of whom he somewhat disses), Wilson quickly passes over this book -- summarizing it as "a story about people on a ship that ran aground, worked out as a social fable" -- in his rush to expend a lot of words slamming Storm's next (and as it turned out, last) novel, "Count Ten," as "very much inferior on the whole to the ones that had gone before." The latter novel put a cap on Storm's most productive literary spurt (three novels published between 1937 and 1940), and although Wilson couldn't have realized it, his dismissal of "Count Ten" was akin to a literary eulogy for Storm, whose career was cut short by his untimely, accidental, and somewhat ironic death in late 1941: he had continued to work in the radio industry, the background for his 1929 debut novel "Full Measure," and was electrocuted while working on an Army Signal Corps transmitter in San Francisco. Signed by Author

Product Info

Publisher: Longmans, Green and Co.

Year: 1939

Type: Used

Binding: Hardcover

First Edition

Signed

Seller Info

ReadInk

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Country: United States