Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox

Los Angeles: Published By the Author. Very Good+ in Fair dj. (c.1933). First Edition. Hardcover. (price-clipped) [light shelfwear, one tiny dent in top edge of each cover; jacket is in pretty rough shape, with about 40% of the lower spine missing (and related paper loss extending a bit into the lower left corner of the front panel), heavy edgewear at flap-folds, various small tears and nicks]. (B&W photo frontispiece) For what he called "A Feature Picture of Wall Street and High Finance," the ever-crusading author co-opted the rise-and-fall tale of cinema pioneer Fox (then recently ousted from the company he founded and that still bore his name) (truncated) in order to deliver one of his trademark fulminations, this one directed against the powers-that-be ("Politics and Finance -- Statesmen and Financiers") in the movie industry. Much of the story is told in Fox's own words -- he reportedly sought Sinclair out and came to his home every day for five weeks to pour out his woes -- and whether or not his narrative holds up to historical scrutiny, there's no denying that its savagely bitter exposure of the inner workings of show-biz finance was without precedent at the time. Also laid in is a small 8-page printed pamphlet entitled "A Letter from Mary Craig Sinclair to Eve Fox"; the letter, dated January 24, 1933, is claimed to have been written "shortly before the book went to press," and in it Mrs. Sinclair asks Mrs. Fox to join with her husband in coming to the realization that they have been complicit in the development of the movie industry along captalist lines, and urges them to support Sinclair's idea that the film business should be nationalized by the U.S. Government and thus "transformed from an instrument of private profit to one of public service." (Is it any wonder that the Hollywood studios fought so viciously to defeat Sinclair when he ran for Governor of California the following year?) This is evidently a second-issue dust jacket, incorporating as it does (on the rear panel) both an excerpt from The Congressional Record of February 23, 1933 (in which Senators William Borah (R-Idaho) and George Norris (R-Nebraska) briefly extol the book's merits on the floor of the Senate) and several "Opinions of Readers" (among them Lincoln Steffens and Rupert Hughes). The front panel, too, is completely different from the more commonly-seen illustrated jacket, employing a photo-montage with overlaid quotations. The book isn't especially rare, but having seen dozens of copies over the course of many decades, I can honestly say that I've never encountered this particular jacket before; and while this example is admittedly in pretty rough shape, you're not likely to see another one anytime soon. (It's presumably a later-issue jacket, given the presence of numerous critics' blurbs on the rear panel.) . (Inventory #: 23732)