Mama's Bank Account

New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Very Good+ in Very Good+ dj. (c.1943). Later Printing. Hardcover. (price-clipped) [minor shelfwear only, one-time owner's name and address in blue ink at top of front endpaper; the jacket is slightly sun-browned at the spine, but otherwise shows no significant wear]. If the term "heart-warming" didn't already exist, it would have had to have been invented to describe both this book and its numerous derivatives: the play "I Remember Mama," adapted by John Van Druten, which ran for two seasons (713 performances) on Broadway; the subsequent 1948 movie adaptation (also I REMEMBER MAMA), directed by George Stevens and starring Irene Dunne; the CBS-TV series "Mama," starring Peggy Wood, which ran for eight seasons; and finally (maybe) a 1979 musical theatre adaptation, notable as the last Broadway show for which Richard Rodgers wrote the music. Although described in the jacket blurb as "a full, rounded story of the Americanization of this Norwegian family living in San Francisco," and generally referred to as a novel, in fact it's seventeen loosely-connected individual episodes, some as brief as five pages, many of which appear to have been written specifically for this volume. (The original story, "Mama and Her Bank Account," had gained attention by its appearance in the February 1941 issue of "Reader's Digest," although that publication sourced it from the Toronto Star Weekly.) Although not the first printing (the code suggests December 1944, if I'm interpreting it correctly), this is a much better than average example of the wear-prone dust jacket, price-clipping notwithstanding. ***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." .