1001 Afternoons in New York

New York: The Viking Press. Very Good. 1941. First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [modest shelfwear, gilt spine lettering somewhat dulled, slight exposure of boards at upper and lower corners of rear cover, slight bump at top of spine, very shallow dents in top edges of both covers, rubbed area at lower corner of rear cover]. (pen and ink drawings) INSCRIBED and SIGNED by the author on the front endpaper: "For / Ian Hunter / his friend / Ben Hecht / love to the Princess." (See below.) After a decade or so of playwriting and (very lucrative) screenwriting, Hecht was lured back to churning out a regular newspaper column by the progressive (truncated) New York daily PM, which began publishing in June 1940, his deal being that "he was to write anything he pleased." This collection of 87 such pieces from his first year or so of the enterprise therefore casts a broad net, featuring everything from anti-Hitler/Nazi polemics to anecdotal snapshots of Gene Fowler, Harpo Marx, and others of his Hollywood set (although from a New York perspective, i.e. they were visiting from "the Coast"). (Hecht's own statement of his overall subject was: "the addle-headed city of New York -- the teeming and invincible citadel of ball games, slum dramas, night life, soap-box revolutions, and all the other jackstraw items of democracy.") The volume was consciously titled to hark back to Hecht's best-selling book from the early 1920s (this one's "elder brother"), "A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago," published when his fame was much more localized. The choice of German emigré George Grosz (then resident in New York, having fled the Nazis in 1933) to provide the illustrations seems to have been made for the book itself, as I've seen no evidence that Grosz's work ever appeared in PM. NOTE: The inscribee of this copy was not Ian Hunter the actor, but rather screenwriter Ian McLellan Hunter; "the Princess" is likely a reference to Hunter's wife, Alice. Signed by Author . (Inventory #: 29594)