Whistle Stop

New York: Random House. Very Good in Very Good dj. (c.1941). Later Printing. Hardcover. [a good sound copy, with moderate shelfwear to the lower extremities and at the top of the spine; the jacket is lightly edgeworn, with some crinkling at the spine ends and minimal paper loss at several corners, and a few tiny and unobtrusive closed edge-tears]. A hard-boiled yarn about a family of shiftless lowlifes in an economically and culturally depressed small town on the outskirts of Detroit, this novel put its young author (just 22 when the book was published) on the literary map, earning special notoriety for its rather raw language as well as its thematic elements (including incest and domestic violence). It was adapted into a somewhat watered-down film version in 1946, starring Ava Gardner and George Raft. The author published five more novels during her lifetime, and one more ("Sudden Rain") was published posthumously, after the manuscript was discovered in her freezer following her death in 2002. A couple of bibliographical notes regarding this copy: (1) the book is bound in full red cloth with gold spine lettering, indicating it as a later printing (the first-state binding of black cloth with red and white paper labels on the spine and front cover prevailed at least through the 4th printing); (2) the jacket is unpriced and "clipped" (by design) at all four flap corners, which indicates that it *might* have been a book-club issue of some kind (I have not confirmed this); (3) this is still a Random House printing, preceding the more common (and more cheaply-produced) Sun Dial Press edition, which didn't appear until 1943. And one more thing, for those who might be inclined to question my identification of the dust jacket illustrator as A.J. Barsdell (as opposed to "H.J. Barsdell," or even in a few cases "Barndell," which appears to be the result of one seller getting it wrong and then being copied by others): it's quite possible that the first initial of this illustrator's signature is neither an "A" or an "H." I have seen just one other example of his (or her) work, the jacket on "Send Me Down" by Henry Steig, and close examination of both signatures reveals that the "A" or "H" is actually a small 5-pointed star -- which to my eye more closely resembles an "A," so I'm going with that -- but am certainly open to any evidence-based challenges. .