Description
Good dust jacket has small tears at edges, chipping at spine. Near Fine binding is yellow cloth over boards, author name gilt stamped on the front cover, spine has gilt lettering, Untrimmed fore-edge. The binding is tight and pages are clean. The book measures 8.6″ tall x 5.8″ wide.
Stated “First Printing”
About the book (from the dust jacket)
“This is the story of Lovey Childs, of Philadelphia, In a certain world it would not be necessary to say of Philadelphia’; the inhabitants of that world needed no more than her nickname, and that had always been the case from the time she was a little girl and not yet Lovey Childs . . .In shops, on trains, she would fix her gaze on a stranger who interested her, and say ‘I’m Lovey. . . . Other children have often said, I’m Mary and I’m Helen, but when a sapphire-eyed child says I’m Lovey’ it can be taken as a self-
appraisal, an invitation, or a statement of fact. In her childhood, when Lovey introduced herself to grownups, they would at least smile, and she grew up in the belief that the grownup world was a friendly place. She could hardly wait to become a member of that world, and she did all she could to hasten her entrance into it.” Lovey Lewis’s efforts to join the adult world were aided by matters she could not foresee or control her father’s financial ineptitude, his early death, her mother’s aberrations. At seventeen she completed the process by her impetuous marriage to Sky Childs, all-American (football) wealthy and worthless: “…the union of two prominent families. If they were not made for
each other, they were made for the tabloid press.”
The main events of the story take place in the second half. the downhill side of the hectic 1920’s a period about which the author has frequently written before with equal authority and conviction. This is one of John 0’Hara’s shortest novels -practically a miniature in comparison to From the Terrace or Ten North Frederick-but its brevity is a matter of method rather than of content. It is a long full-bodied story deliberately foreshortened, presented primarily through key scenes, with the connecting links sketched in briefly or suggested to the imagination. The characters are seldom described; it is through what they do and say that the reader comes to know them, and also, in some cases with reluctance, to believe them.
