Who Lost an American?

viii+337 pages. Octavo (8 1/2" x 6") bound in original publishers blue cloth with two toned brown and beige binding and green lettering to cover and brown and green lettering to spine in original jacket. Signed First edition

The bon voyage party was attended by such literary lights as the chief junior editor of Doubledeal and Wundershot, a novelist named Norman Nalifellow, and Ginny Ginstruck, the agent. Afterward the author found himself aboard the first-class ship Meyer Davis, sailing over a first-class sea. His grand tour encompassed London, Paris, Dublin, Barcelona, Seville, Almeria, Instanbul, Crete - and his hometown Chicago. This book, however, is not som much an "inside Europe" - heaven help the tourist who tried to duplicate his travel adventures - as an "Inside Nelson Algren." To be sure, there is "scenery" in these pages - London's ancestral mists, the bright, enormous mornings in the Barrio-Chino of Barcelona, the shadow of the Mountain in Greece where Zeus was born. But it is chiefly follies and absurdities, opinions and - above all - people, which give distinction to the story of his voyages. Some of the people are famous: Simone de Beauviir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Brendan Behan, Juliette Greco; some are pure invention, for the book is a fascinating melange of fact and fiction. Maxwell Geismar has said of Nelson Algren that he "represents a solid and enduring part of the American heritage of dissent" His "dissenting opinions" on everything from contemporary writers to the moral attitudes of Playboy Club key-holders make Who Lost an American? a witty, engaging risible and thoughtful book. It is at once the lightest of heart and maturest of mind of anything Algren had written so far.

Condition:

Slight foxing to hinge, jacket corners chipped, small closed edge tears, spine extremities small chips, closed tears and creases else a very good copy in about a very good jacket.