Description
Poor dust jacket, pieces missing at head and foot of spine, all edges worn. Very Good- binding is black cloth over boards, red cloth-backed. A candle lit at both ends appears on front cover near spine. White and black lettering on spine. Edge-wear, corners bumped, corner-wear. Name written on front free end paper. Untrimmed fore-edge. Jacket design by Ben Feder, Inc The binding is tight and pages are clean. The book measures 8.6″ tall x 5.9″ wide.
Stated “First Edition”
About the book (from the dust jacket)
Craig Price’s picture on a cover of Time magazine showed a face older than its years, eyes cold and defiant but lonely too, physical scars that suggested a rough life and kept the face from being too handsome.
A rough life it had been. As a poor boy in a small Carolina town Craig bought his grandfather’s advice: “Don’t go through your life with a hookworm philosophy- just settin’ and lettin` it pass. Grab it and use it and kick the stuff right out of it, and don’t never, ever, let it run you.”
To Craig it made sense. The creed became an inescapably logical way to get from the poverty, hunger, and loneliness of his Carolina youth to where he wanted to go–the top, the pinnacle of power epitomized by that Time cover. Craig himself summarized it in a moment of honest confession to a woman he loved, “I horse traded and gambled, mostly with a rigged deck. .. . I bought this and sold chat and borrowed from this to buy that . . .I bought some companies and milked them and threw them away, I met some women, attractive women, and repeated the process. I drained them dry and threw them away….
Among these women was Julie duFresne, at first only his college roommate’s mother, later the fascinating tutor of an eager pupil Scared, defenseless Maybelle Grimes had something he wanted -her father’s mills. There was also beautiful, sweet Libby Forney, who had been warned that falling in love with Craig was heartbreak. Finally, at the top was Susan Strong. It cost him a fortune to get her; the price proved too high for both the man and the woman.
Craig’s triumphs were vital; the means was not important. In college he cut corners, moral and legal. As a seaman on ratty freighters and in dirty seaports, he embraced skull busting and thievery as a way of keeping a berth and filling an aching belly. As a fledgling businessman he traded on Maybelle’s vulnerability and her mother’s terminal illness to bull his way into money. From then on the dog-eat-dog pattern was the quickest way, the best way, Craig’s way. And it worked, right up into millions of dollars and the ownership of anything he wanted, human or inanimate.
In this big, searing novel Robert Ruark has created a protagonist at once dismayingly familiar and fortunately unique. Craig Price is ruthless and sometimes compassionate, both cynical and sentimental, devious and yet frequently disarmingly honest. In short, Craig Price is the inconsistent, unpredictable chameleon of motivations and principles that are most men-but the stakes were higher, Craig more desperate, than most. And in Craig’s case the driving compulsion to stay on top, to be poor no more,” was strong: it took him longer to learn what he was really looking for at the end of the hard road.
About the author (from the dust jacket)
Robert Ruark is world famous as a newspaper columnist and author. His seven books range from hilarious parody (Grenadine Etching), through the nostalgic charm of boyhood ecstacy (The Old Man and the Boy), to the raw power of his best-selling novel of the Mau Mau insurrection (Something of Value). Naval officer, world traveler, working newspaperman, big-game hunter and shrewd observer of the international scene, Robert Ruark has put something of all of his experiences-and something of all of us-into the characters and story of Poor No More.
