The Male Animal: A Comedy in Three Acts [*Warner Bros. Story Dept. copy*]

New York: Random House. Very Good. (c.1940). First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [a good sound copy with just light shelfwear, vertical lines in margins next to a few lines of dialogue late in the play; marked as a former Warner Bros. Story Department copy by a stamp on the front endpaper and a call number (WB 1177) written on the spine in black ink; see NOTES for explanation of additional markings]. (line drawings) Romantic comedy centering around issues of free speech on a football-crazy Midwestern college campus. A big hit on Broadway in 1940 (243 performances), and the basis for the 1942 Warner Bros. film of the same name, directed by co-author Nugent and starring Henry Fonda and Olivia de Havilland. Per pencil notes in the upper left corner of the front endpaper, this copy was examined by a number of studio people over the course of ten years: the earliest were "Einfeld 9/1" and "Publicity 12/18" (Charles Einfeld was the studio's head of publicity; those two check-out dates are probably from 1941, since the film was released in April 1942); next was "BKAMB 2/26/46" (whose identity eludes me); "Mr. Trilling 1/5/50" (this would be Steve Trilling, a studio executive who at that time was second in command to Jack Warner); and finally "Goff + R 6/20/50" (almost certainly the screenwriting time of Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts). These latter two check-outs *might* be related to the studio's re-working of the property (as a musical) under the title SHE'S WORKING HER WAY THROUGH COLLEGE, released in 1952, although Goff & Roberts were not the credited writers on same. (And to throw another Warner Bros.-related name into the mix: this book was acquired from the estate of director Vincent Sherman, a studio stalwart during the 1940s, although there are no markings in the book to that effect, nor did he (apparently) have anything to do with either film version.) . (Inventory #: 29242)