The Hollywood Hallucination

New York: Creative Age Press, Inc.. Good. (c.1944). First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [binding intact, but shelfworn; apparently a rental-library book at one time, stamped as such (Timms Libraries, Inc., Syracuse NY) on front endpaper, and with some scarring and residue on both endpapers and pastedowns from removed labels and once-affixed jacket flaps]. The first book of film criticism by this influential critic, who has achieved a kind of lasting literary fame as the object of Myra/Myron's admiration in Gore Vidal's "Myra Breckinridge." The book was reprinted (along with Tyler's other notable early work, "Magic and Myth of the Movies") in the early 1970s, which prompted Vidal to quip that he had "done for [Tyler] what Edward Albee did for Virginia Woolf." I've seen no account of what Tyler himself might have thought about that, but in any event he was able to publish three more books of film history/criticism (including the landmark "Screening the Sexes," the first book about homosexuality in the movies) prior to his death in 1974. The first edition didn't make much of a splash at the time, and is fairly scarce. .