Mildred Pierce

Cleveland/New York: The World Publishing Company. Very Good in Good dj. 1946 (c.1941). Tower Books edition Sixth Printing. Hardcover. [a solid enough copy, with slight bumping to the lower tips, but with the interior showing the usual age-toning commensurate with the cheap production values of these editions; the jacket is edgeworn, with numerous tiny tears and chips, small bits of paper loss at most corners and the spine ends. (photographic dust jacket) The "Tower Motion Picture Edition" of Cain's classic about a determined woman who uses her cooking skills and her innate toughness to overcome the challenges of divorce and poverty (not to mention the world's most ungrateful daughter) to claw her way into the middle class. The basis for two very different film adaptations -- the great 1945 film noir with Joan Crawford (which departed considerably from the novel, and for which this edition was a tie-in) and the 2011 HBO miniseries with Kate Winslet (which was almost slavishly faithful to the book). .