Pug

New York: The Greystone Press. Very Good+. (c.1941). First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [a good sound copy with light external wear, very slight fading to spine cloth, a few tiny white flecks on front cover, slight bumping to lower corners]. The author's rather scarce first novel, a boxing yarn set "not [in] the world of the champion -- the exception -- but that of the average youngster who grins and takes it, and is offered up as a sacrifice to the sadism of the mob and the greed of the manipulators of the game." (Quoted from the dust jacket on another copy of the book; NOT present on this copy.) The book was the winner of the "Greystone Bookman's Prize Contest," quite possibly the only book to ever be thus honored. According to contemporary press coverage, Idell gathered the background information for this novel while acting as a boxing promoter in Charlotte and Asheville, North Carolina. Although its plot and milieu evoke pretty much every boxing movie of the 1940s (BODY AND SOUL, THE SET-UP, et al.), there's no evidence that Hollywood came a-knocking at Mr. Idell's door until the publication of his third book, "Centennial Summer," a couple of years later, which was subsequently adapted for the 1946 20th Century-Fox film of the same name. .