Watchman, What of the Night?

Garden City NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.. Near Fine in Very Good dj. 1963. First Edition. Hardcover. [spine a bit turned but no other significant wear to book, just a previous owner's single name written on the front endpaper; the jacket has some dog-earing and very slight bits of paper loss at the spine extremities]. "An episode out of a fabulous Broadway career," this book tells the behind-the-scenes story of how the author took a play that flopped out of town -- "The Heiress," based on Henry James's "Washington Square" -- and turned it into a Broadway smash hit. Harris, "feeling [the play] had failed because it had been misdirected, miscast, and badly adapted for the stage, set out the almost impossible task of re-producing a known flop," a process he likened to "getting an obstreperously drunken friend home from a party." .