John O'Hara PAL JOEY First Edition
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John O'Hara PAL JOEY First Edition
First UK edition, first print hardback of PAL JOEY by John O'Hara and published by The Cresset Press Ltd., London in 1952.The book is in good condition (Clean red boards with slightly darkened gilt lettering on spine which has slight creasing to the spine edges), with some wear to the dust jacket which is not price clipped (slight creasing, rubbing and chipping to some parts of the edges, small pieces missing from the corners and more at the spine edges, three closed tears, two to the top edge near the corners, one to the bottom spine corner, a two inch closed tear to the other bottom corner of the spine. All have been repaired by pieces of sticky tape. There is some tanning & foxing inside and at the back of the jacket and small sticker removal wear to the front and another at the back). Internally, the pages are clean and tight and there are no tears and no inscriptions. There is slight tanning and foxing inside to some of the pages and page ends. Not in the best condition, perhaps, but still a readable first edition of a collectable title.
John Henry O'Hara (1905 1970) earned a reputation first for short stories and became a best-selling novelist by age thirty with Appointment in Samarra and BUtterfield 8. He was particularly known for an uncannily accurate ear for dialogue. O'Hara was a keen observer of social status and class differences, and wrote frequently about the socially ambitious. A controversial figure, O'Hara had a reputation for personal irascibility and for cataloging social ephemera, both of which frequently overshadowed his gifts as a storyteller.
Pal Joey is a 1940 epistolary novel, which became the basis of the 1940 stage musical comedy and 1957 motion picture of the same name, with music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Lorenz Hart. It was written as a series of letters or short stories in the magazine The New Yorker in the late 1930s. O'Hara's stories tell of Joey Evans, a second-rate nightclub entertainer in 1930s Chicago, in which he meets and falls in love with the woman "Linda." In a series of letters to "dear Pal Ted" from "Pal Joey," he reveals himself to be an amoral, calculating heel whose venality is cloaked by an amiable persona. Joey's letters are written in literate but uneducated English.
"SMALL-TIME crooners who operate in hot 'nite-spots' in the seedier districts of Chicago, may be masters of the mumbled word, but give them a ball-point pen and they won't know which end to suck. Not so Pal Joey, the poor man's Bing Crosby. Pal Joey wassucking the right end, as cutely as any Damon Runyon, in his cradle. By the time he'd reached the age of indiscretion, he had gotten himself an extraordinary style of his own, shockingly free from the conventional restraints and formalities of syntax, grammar, and spelling; and as uninhibited, slick, and risque as his own wise-cracking conversation.
Pal Joey's unique contribution to literature consists of his letters to Friend Ted, a prosperous New York bandleader. In them he retails all the lowdown on his precarious jobs, shady escapades, and easy amours with the prettiest mice on the dance-floor. In so doing he provides a sparkling commentary on the raffish side of cheap night life in darkest Chicago at the height of the jitterbug era.
Pal Joey is one of the happiest of Mr. John O'Hara's inventions; and though his letters are witty trifles by comparison with Mr. O'Hara's novels, they are among the most engaging and the most cunningly finished of his works. Originally serialized in The New Yorker, this if the first English edition."
124 pages.
ISBN: n/a
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John O'Hara PAL JOEY First Edition
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