Whistle for Me

New York: William Morrow & Co.. Very Good in Very Good dj. 1933. First Edition. Hardcover. [a little discoloration to cloth at joints, light staining to gutters and both pastedowns, slight bumping to several corners; jacket is edgeworn and lightly soiled, with various small tears (including 1-1/2" split at bottom front hinge), a bit of paper loss at both ends of spine (no loss of text)] The author's first (and only) novel, about a quartet of young people, two of whom are ambitious musical performers: Paul, a talented and popular pianist with a dance orchestra (who dreams of composing a great tone poem), and Joanna, a nightclub singer with a young brother to support (whose intense focus on her career seems to leave no room for love). The action all takes place in California, in settings from "the sun-baked beaches of La Jolla to the snow-capped range of the Sierra Madre," and one of the other major characters is an assistant art director at a movie studio, so this qualifies as a Hollywood novel, too. According to the jacket blurb, the 24-year-old author had wandered all over the map as while still in his teens, once "making an adventuresome trip, hitch-hiking, rod-riding, bumming across the country in a speedy sixteen days." Maybe he hit the road again after publishing this book; at any rate, his literary career seems to have gone nowhere at all. (The book's title, by the way, comes from a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, quoted on the title page.) . (Inventory #: 17539)