Play It as It Lays

New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1970 First edition, first printing. Publisher's red and black cloth, with a sun illustration and the author's initials to the front board in blind, spine lettered in gilt, laid endpapers; in the original pictorial dust jacket designed by Janet Halverson, with an illustration of a snake pointing its forked tongue at a gradient sun to the front panel, lettered in black, with a photograph of Didion by Julian Wasser to the rear panel. Fine book, with just a touch of dimming to spine; very good unclipped dust jacket, with some faint numbers in pencil to front panel and a couple of tiny marks in pen, light toning to spine, (truncated) contemporary Doubleday sticker and some staining to rear panel, and a vertical crease to front flap. Overall, an attractive copy. Play It as It Lays is a novel that tells the story of Maria Wyeth, a young actress/model struggling to find purpose in life. Set in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, the text begins with Wyeth in recovery from a mental breakdown, and the rest of the novel chronicles the events that led to her institutionalization. Wyeth, "an emotional drifter who has become almost anesthetized against pain and pleasure," is moved neither by her husband nor her lovers, but is "touched only by her neurally damaged daughter Kate." Just as F. Scott Fitzgerald expressed the dejection of the Lost Generation, Didion captures the ennui of the "affluent, disoriented people of subtropical America" in the 1960s. In 1972, Play It as It Lays was adapted into a film of the same name starring Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins.. First Edition. Hard Cover. Fine/Dust Jacket Included. (Inventory #: JD006)