The Writer as Illusionist. A Speech Delivered at Smith College, March 4, 1955

New York: Unitelum Press, 1955. First Edition. S.J. Perelman’s own personal copy, inscribed by the author, William Maxwell: “Dear Sid [Perelman] - the camel in question - B.” on the front cover. With a document providing provenance laid in. 16 pages. A staplebound pamphlet reprinting a speech on the art and craft of writing by William Maxwell, delivered at Smith College in 1955. Touch of dust soiling and minor use in printed wrappers. William Maxwell (1908 – 2000) was an American novelist and editor, best known as the fiction editor of The New Yorker magazine (truncated) for forty years (1936-1975), where he worked with writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, Frank O'Connor, John O'Hara, Eudora Welty, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Sidney Joseph Perelman, popularly known as S. J. Perelman (1904 – 1979), was one of the most widely read literary icons of the Golden Age of American Humor. His New Yorker pieces, fiction, and collected essays are legendary for their biting wit and mastery of caricature and language. Off and on throughout his career he worked in film, notably as a contributing screenwriter on such Hollywood comedy classics as Monkey Business and Horse Feathers with the Marx Brothers, Mike Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days (for which he won an Oscar), co-creator of the hit Broadway musical comedy One Touch of Venus starring Mary Martin, as well as many publishing (including twenty-one books), radio, television, and travel writing ventures. He was the brother-in-law of the writer Nathanael West with whom he shared a close relationship up until West’s death in a car accident in 1940 at age thirty-seven, and whose memory and literary reputation he devoted himself to maintaining. His inner circle of literary and show-business friends and associates included F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Marx Brothers, Mike Todd, Harold Ross, T.S. Eliot, Al Hirschfeld, Bennett Cerf, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy Parker, Fred Allen, Kaufman and Hart, Ogden Nash, Ernest Hemingway, W. Somerset Maugham, etc. S.J. Perelman was a gifted man with conflicting desires living and working in complex times. While his writing brought much laughter to the world, his personal life reflected his restless spirit and inner struggles with his relationships to his family, friends, and intimates. Dorothy Herrmann ends her wonderful biography of Perelman with these insights: “…his genius was unique…highly literate and inventive, yet cranky and irreverent…perhaps no other modern writer was willing to match his commitment to words…Whether this was a rare gift or a feverish obsession is unimportant in the last analysis. For he made us forget for a brief time our own pain and sorrows – and enter a wild, wonderful realm of fantasy that was sublime.” (Inventory #: 18764E)