West, Nathaniel

8vo.  Original green cloth; slight rubbing at ends of spine and fore-corners. Pictorial dust jacket; worn, top of spine chipped with partial loss of three letters in title, rear panel soiled.

White A4

first edition of West’s third book. inscribed by west on the front free endpaper to a Hollywood producer for whom he worked: “For Robert Sisk—I wrote this thing when I discovered that Horatio Alger was the Marx of American economics and the Bullfinch of American fable—but I guess I should have waited until the ‘League for Peace and Democracy’ was formed because this time the early bird never got out of the 1st edition—Nathanael West, July 28, 1938.” The rear panel of the jacket contains a humorous biographical sketch of the author—most likely written by West (or at least the erroneous facts supplied by him). The last line reads: “A Cool Million was written without malice.” Next to this, West has written in ink: “The hell you say! W.” West’s mordant take on the Horatio Alger myth was published on 19 June 1934, most likely in an edition of 3,000 copies. It was not reprinted until 1961, long after his death, and then as a 50–cent paperback.

This copy was inscribed by West eight days after he finished the first draft of his screenplay for Five Came Back, a movie that the recipient Robert Sisk was producing at RKO Pictures. West had been at Republic from 1936 until his contract expired in early 1938. On 6 June 1938, he was hired by RKO at $350 a week. After spending some two months polishing his script, West was released by RKO and eventually had to share screen writing credits with two others, including Dalton Trumbo. Five Came Back, starring Chester Morris and Lucille Ball as survivors of a jungle plane crash, was released in 1939 and has “gradually achieved cult status ... as well as being the starting point for many variations” (Halliwell’s Film Guide). Sisk (1903-1964) went on producing movies into the 1950s, his best known, after Five Came Back, perhaps being Across the Wide Missouri (1951).