Entirely Surrounded. [Inscribed Association Copy]

1st ed., 8vo, yellow cloth in pictorial dust jacket. 247 [1] pp.

Charles Brackett practiced law for several years before being hired as drama critic at The New Yorker, on the strength of his short stories for The Saturday Evening Post and his second novel, Week-End. He left New York to work as a Hollywood screenwriter, and had his greatest success in a long-running collaboration with Billy Wilder, including Ninotchka, The Lost Weekend and Sunset Blvd. "Entirely Surrounded" is a humorous novel about nineteen-thirties New Yorkers who holiday in Vermont. Many of the characters are stand-ins for a who's who of the Algonquin Club; Brackett was one of the members of that literary social circus and he dedicates the novel to "Dorothy" [Parker]. Brackett also became a film producer as well as president of the Screen Writers Guild (1938-1939) and president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 1949 through 1955. He won three Academy Awards (for writing the scripts for The Lost Weekend (1945), Sunset Boulevard (1950), and Titanic (1953) and received an Honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement in 1959.

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Inscribed on the half-title to Frank Partos, a fellow screenwriter and frequent writing partner. Partos shared an Academy Award nomination for the 1948 film "The Snake Pit" and co-wrote the film noir classic "The House on Telegraph Hill".

Condition: Good; a clean, tight copy overall but with discoloration to covers, mostly on the edes and hinge; foxing to rear fly leaves. In fair dustjacket with 3" open tear at top front and spine, several smaller edge nicks, spine darkened.

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