Salt Lake

New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Good. 1922. 1st (U.S.) edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [solid enough book with binding intact, but should be considered a reading copy only due to external wear and bumping, an unsightly beverage-ring scar on the front cover (see scan), and internal tape repait to a page that had been ripped in half]. Uncommon novel, originally published in France in 1921. It's "historical fiction" in a sense, but as the New York Times described it in 1922, "it is not a history of Salt Lake City as occupied by the Mormons so much as the story of the mental and physical anguish of a young widow who is unsuspectingly drawn into marriage with a Mormon and finds herself the second wife -- one of three wives, and perhaps others." A stage adaptation was presented in Paris in 1926, about which the Times correspondent commented that the playwright "obviously knows very little about Utah and the history of the Mormons and Mormonism and was forced to rely entirely upon Pierre Benoit, who also unfortunately knows very little concerning them, a fact which did not prevent his novel from obtaining immense popularity in France." (Nor did it prevent Benoit, whose best-known work is probably "L'Atlantide" (1919), from becoming a member of the Académie française in 1931.) .