First Edition of the Author's First Novel
What Makes Sammy Run?
New York: Random House, 1941.
First edition, first printing of the author's first novel. Octavo (8 x 5 3/8 inches; 204 x 135 mm). [vi], 303, [3, blank pp].
Original light blue and dark blue cloth. Boards ruled in center in gilt. Spine lettered and stamped in gilt. Top edge dyed gray. Cloth with some minimal rubbing to gilt. Endpapers with some toning from glue. In publisher's unrestored dust jacket. Jacket with some small chips along edges and th head and tail of spine. Still, a beautiful, about fine copy of this classic.
Budd Schulberg, Academy Award-winning writer (for the screenplay for On the Waterfront,1954) wrote this novel about the hyper-ambitious and mercenary Sammy Glick in 1941, four years after he began his writing career in Hollywood (with uncredited writing on A Star is Born). The novel is told from the standpoint of one of Glick's colleagues (he doesn’t have any real friends), Al Manheim, who watches Sammy with a mixture of awe and disgust, much in the way narrator Nick Carraway watches Jay Gatsby in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
HBS 68780.
$2,500.
Price: $2,500.00
Item #68780