John Fury

New York: Harper & Brothers. Very Good+ in Very Good dj. (c.1946). First Edition. Hardcover. [light shelfwear, a bit of dust-soiling to top edge; the jacket is mildly edgeworn, somewhat faded at spine, and has a few tiny insect-nibbles at the bottom of the rear flap]. "The story of John Fury, an Irish immigrant in the Philadelphia of the early nineteen hundreds is the tragedy of a man who had neither the understanding or the ability to control his own fate," as he "moves from a happy marriage to an unpleasant one in a life of poverty, hard work, and frustration, where his only reprisal is anger." (First quote from the jacket blurb; the second from Wikipedia.) Dunphy was a novelist and playwright who is best remembered not for his own work (half a dozen novels and a similar number of plays), but as the longtime companion/partner of Truman Capote. (They met in 1948, and were together -- although often maintaining separate residences, and platonically after 1975, per Wikipedia -- until Capote's death in 1984, when Dunphy was named in Capote's will as his primary beneficiary.) According to a contemporary review in The New York Times, Dunphy's novel "does for Philadelphia" what "Betty Smith did tenderly for Brooklyn, James T. Farrell harshly for Chicago, and Edward McSorley ... moving[ly] for Providence." ***This book is among the nearly 150 items offered in ReadInk's new Catalog Number 4, "Booking Passage: Books on the Immigrant Experience." You can access this catalog and its contents in any one of three ways: (1) email us to request a PDF to be emailed to you; (2) view or download the catalog from the link on our website's main page; (3) browse the books individually (including a few that didn't make the cut for the catalog) on our website under these two subject headings: "Immigration: Fiction" and "Immigration: Non-fiction." .