West of Fifth

Garden City NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc.. Very Good-. 1930. First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [a good sound copy with only moderate shelfwear, some fading to spine cloth, minor fraying at top of spine, lower tips lightly bumped with very slight exposure of boards, internally nice and clean]. Novel about "a girl press agent who knew what she wanted and got it." Catharine Brody was a newspaper and magazine writer before directing her efforts to fiction in the 1920s. She began modestly, with a digest-sized pulp novel called "Why Girls Go Back Home" (also published serially), but really got going in the late 1920s with "Babe Evanson," a tale of a New York office-girl; "West of Fifth" was her next book, and obviously drew on her journalistic experience. After the Depression hit, she turned out a couple of quasi-proletarian novels -- "Nobody Starves" (centered around a couple trying to make a go of it as factory workers in Detroit) and "Cash Item" (about the repercussions of a bank failure) -- but although both were well-received, she appears to have then more or less dropped off the literary map. I've run down references to a couple of syndicated newspaper short stories circa 1936, a couple of articles in the slicks in 1938, and a "vignette" in a 1944 issue of Liberty, and that's it; no obituary has yet turned up, nor any significant biographical information (apart from the fact that she was born in Latvia). What became of her, I wonder? .