The Taken Town

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Very Good in Fair dj. 1947. First American Edition. Hardcover. (price-clipped) [moderately shelfworn, light age-toning to edges of text block, faint old bookseller's rubber-stamp at bottom corner of front pastedown (Bertrand Smith Acres of Books, Long Beach, California); the jacket is heavily edgeworn, with a bit of paper loss at the spine ends and a dampstain along the bottom edge (externally visible only on the rear panel and both flaps) Novel, published the previous year in England, about a young fellow, "a man of limited emotional experience [who] went to war at nineteen and came back at twenty-five." Postwar, he has gone to work as an engineer at a very conservative firm, and his aggressiveness and ruthlessness -- attributed to his wartime experience -- have earned him a position of prominence in the firm. The action of the novel is confined to a single weekend, the setting being a party at the country home of the head of his company, at which the firm's directors and officials are in attendance, and at which he hopes to convince them to adopt some of his unscrupulous business practices. Things get complicated, though, when he meets and falls in love with an attractive older woman at the party, only to later discover that she's mistress of one of the directors, to which he has a violent reaction. .