[McMURTRY, Larry (1936-2021), his copy]. WEST, Nathanael (1903-1940). The Day of the Locust. New York: Random House, [1939].
8vo. Original red cloth, printed spine label, black top stain (extremities a bit darkened, stain on rear cover, some minor stains); original unclipped dust jacket (front panel marred partially affecting review, small chip at head; folding box. 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, REVIEW COPY with publisher’s slip laid in. 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’”. The Day of the Locust is West’s classic novel of Hollywood’s “lunatic fringe” that focuses on “the beauty-contest winners from county fairs; the broken-down vaudeville actors and emasculated cowboys; the fanatical mothers determined to make Shirley Temples of their children come hell or highwater... Above all, it is the story of the great mass of bored Middle-Westerners who come to California to die in the sun and find it a long, extremely dull process which they can only alleviate by outbreaks of violence” (from the front flap). White 5.