Brother

Indianapolis/New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. Very Good+. (c.1936). First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [good solid copy, light age-toning to edges of text block, interesting vintage bookplate (of one T. Leeford Givens; see notes) on front pastedown]. Novel set in a small Midwestern town, about three sisters who are excessively (even pathologically) devoted to their brother, a young lawyer; their complicated family ties and obligations get in the way of his desire to marry a local divorcee. The New York Times reviewer described the sisters as "withering virgins, dressed in perpetual mourning, cloistered in their gloomy ancestral house, [with] a good deal of the grave about them"; reference is made to the work of Eugene O'Neill, specifically "Mourning Becomes Electra." The Wisconsin-born author, whose second (and last) novel this was, had published numerous short stories and edited a couple of literary magazines prior to his short-lived career as a novelist. T. Leeford Givens (better known as Hank Givens), whose fish-themed bookplate adorns this copy, was a well-known newspaper editor whose career encompassed positions at the Wichita (Kansas) Beacon and the Denver Post, and who ended up in Orange County, California, where he was the publisher of the Santa Ana Independent at the time of his death in 1959. .