Young Gentlemen, Rise

New York: Farrar & Rinehart. Good. (c.1935). First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [a good solid copy, but with considerable external spotting, mostly to spine and front cover; internally clean and well-bound, but still best to consider this a reading copy only]. Novel about four college classmates (Yale, Class of 1928) who get together in 1934 to swap tales of their trials and tribulations in the intervening early Depression years. The New York Times critic was quite disdainful of the whole enterprise: "No argot is so flavorless, unimaginative, spurious, artificial and witless as the jargon of the campus. Mr. Ingham revels in it ad nauseam. If we take his word for it, Yale undergraduates, and particularly the class of '28, and especially [the novel's main characters] are youthful infantiles whose vainglorious deeds, puppy itches, childish mentalities and baby emotions can scarcely be taken seriously except as phenomena." (Sounds to me like sour grapes from a critic -- the review is signed only "F.T.M." -- who couldn't get into an Ivy League school.) The author turned out just one more novel, "Play On Your Harp," the following year; it was trashed by a different New York Times critic, and that apparently did it as far as his novelistic ambitions were concerned. .