The Last Mile: A Play in Three Acts

New York/Los Angeles: Samuel French. Very Good-. (c.1930, 1929). Later Printing. Softcover. [minor wear to extremities, spine somewhat browned, old selling price of $1.00 rubber-stamped at upper corner of front cover, some pencil annotations throughout Act 1]. (B&W photo frontispiece) Classic "big house" melodrama, focusing on a group of prisoners on Death Row in a Federal prison in Oklahoma. Spencer Tracy's starring performance in the original Broadway production led directly to his first Hollywood contract, although when the play was filmed in 1932 the role went to Preston Foster (and subsequently to Mickey Rooney when the picture was remade in 1959). Playwright Wexley made his way to Hollywood, too, and garnered a few notable screenwriting credits before his politics caught up with him (he was a Communist Party member) and he was blacklisted in the late 1940s. The book's preface is by Lewis E. Lawes, Warden of Sing Sing Prison since 1920, who wrote numerous books on penal-related topics, most notably "Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing" (1932). This printing probably dates from the late 1930s; the cover design is identical to the first softcover printing, but in this book both "They Shall Not Die" (1934) and "Steel" (1937) are listed as the playwright's other works. Also: unlike the first printing, which was illustrated with three black-and-white stills from the original production, this copy has only a single photo as the frontispiece. .