The Wind

New York/London: Harper & Brothers. Very Good+. 1925. 1st Edition (H-Z). Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [a good sound copy, with minor wear to the extremities, some age-toning to the edges of the text block, and a few light vertical scrapes on the front cover]. First edition, lacking the rare dust jacket, of this starkly realistic novel about a Virginia-born-and-bred woman facing the hardships of life on the arid plains of West Texas in the 1880s, notable both as Texas fiction and as the source for the 1928 silent film adaptation starring Lillian Gish. The book was published in October 1925, although the "H-Z" letter code in this copy decodes (truncated) to August 1925, suggesting that its initial release may have been a bit delayed. The original attribution to "Anonymous" -- which was done either for the publicity value or because of the Texas native author's trepidations about her unflattering portrayal of her home state (although she was at the time living in New York and teaching at Columbia University), or perhaps both -- lasted only until the end of January 1926, when the author's name was made public; all printings subsequent to that time bore Scarborough's name. Later in 1926 it was announced that M-G-M had acquired the motion picture rights, reportedly at the specific request of director Clarence Brown, who planned to film the book without altering any of its grimmer aspects; in the end, however, it was Swedish director Victor Seastrom (Sjöström) who brought it to the screen, as his next-to-last American film. . (Inventory #: 19056)