WEST, NATHANAEL. A Cool Million. The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin. New York: Covici-Friede [1934]. 8vo, original tan cloth, spine darkened, sides a bit foxed. FIRST EDITION of West's third book and novel, PRESENTATION COPY TO ROBERT M. COATES, inscribed by the author a day before publication on front free endpaper: "Dear Bob -- I offer you a first-class, slow-trailing coonhound from Kentucky -- a real hound with a beautiful bell-like voice -- and you don't even reply. You ingrate. Nathanael West. June 18, 1934. How about coming down here for the bass fishing?" West's novel, a broad satire or burlesque of the Horatio Alger myth, was published on 19 June in an edition of 3000 copies; West undoubtedly inscribed this copy at his Erwinna, Pa., farmhouse, to his close friend Coates who was living near Sherman, Conn. Jay Martin notes in Nathanael West: The Art of His Life (New York, 1970), pp. 237-8: "West's particular kind of joking in A Cool Million combined his reading in satiric traditions with the brutal comedy of American burlesque. With Robert Coates, an aficionado of vaudeville, West had frequently gone to Harlem nightclubs, to burlesque, or to performances of Jimmy Durante..."
WEST, NATHANAEL. A Cool Million. The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin. New York: Covici-Friede [1934]. 8vo, original tan cloth, spine darkened, sides a bit foxed. FIRST EDITION of West's third book and novel, PRESENTATION COPY TO ROBERT M. COATES, inscribed by the author a day before publication on front free endpaper: "Dear Bob -- I offer you a first-class, slow-trailing coonhound from Kentucky -- a real hound with a beautiful bell-like voice -- and you don't even reply. You ingrate. Nathanael West. June 18, 1934. How about coming down here for the bass fishing?" West's novel, a broad satire or burlesque of the Horatio Alger myth, was published on 19 June in an edition of 3000 copies; West undoubtedly inscribed this copy at his Erwinna, Pa., farmhouse, to his close friend Coates who was living near Sherman, Conn. Jay Martin notes in Nathanael West: The Art of His Life (New York, 1970), pp. 237-8: "West's particular kind of joking in A Cool Million combined his reading in satiric traditions with the brutal comedy of American burlesque. With Robert Coates, an aficionado of vaudeville, West had frequently gone to Harlem nightclubs, to burlesque, or to performances of Jimmy Durante..."
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