[McMURTRY, Larry (1936-2021), his copy]. WEST, Nathanael (1903-1940). A Cool Million. The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin. New York: Covici Friede, 1934.
8vo. Original light tan cloth, front cover stamped in green (some spotting to covers and text block); original unclipped dust jacket (spine gently sunned, front joint with some separation, few old tape repairs at verso edges); folding cloth chemise and slipcase. Provenance: Larry McMurtry (his bookplate, which he designed, features the horseshoe-shaped brand his father and grandfather used on the McMurtry cattle), from his personal library at his home in Archer City.
FIRST EDITION, INSCRIBED BY WEST on front free endpaper. West’s third novel is a satire of the eternal optimism found in the work of Horatio Alger. “West’s particular kind of joking in A Cool Million combined his reading in satiric traditions with the brutal comedy of American burlesque” (Jay West, Nathanael West: The Art of His Life, 1970, p. 237). In Freudenberger and Stein’s Bibliostyle: How We Live at Home with Books (2019), McMurtry talks of not burdening his heirs with his 30,000-book library at his home in Archer City but there were a select few that he would never sell: “Nathanael West’s four novels would be ones I wouldn’t part with: The Dream Life of Balso Snell; Miss Lonelyhearts; A Cool Million: The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin; and The Day of the Locust. Other than those volumes, my library is, you might say, ‘a vibrant intellectual ecosystem’”. White 4.