Straw Wife

New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, Inc.. Near Fine in Near Fine dj. 1946. First Edition. Hardcover. [sharp-looking copy, no significant wear to book apart from a slightly bumped top front corner; the jacket is bright and attractive, with minor edgewear and one tiny nick at the top of the front panel]. Novel about a young wife "who all her life wants only two things. One is to be herself, and the other is to please and be pleased. Her fight to acheive these ends furnishes a novel which is both entertaining and probing." This was the author's second published novel, his first having been the Avery Hopwood Award-winning "A Sweep of Dusk," published the previous year; curiously, with such a fast start out of the gate, and then still only in his mid-twenties (b. 1922), he does not seem to have been heard from ever again. Maybe he never got over the Knoxville News-Sentinel book critic's conclusion, in her review, that "Mr. Kehoe knows some very odd women or that he doesn't know women at all," or the Kansas City Star's judgment of him as "still in the 'promising' class." Ouch. Even less charitiable was the Rev. John S. Kennedy, book critic for the Los Angeles Catholic publication The Tidings, who admits not liking the author's first book but found this one "even worse": "One wonders periodically whether Mr. Kehoe may not be trying for farcical effect, but whenever one piece of foolishness is piled upon another to the point of arrant silliness, a pretentious passage indicates that Mr. Kehoe is grimly serious." .