Two Black Sheep

New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corporation. Good. 1931. First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [shelfworn copy, front hinge cracked but not separated, light bumping/fraying at several extremities, slight exposure of boards at bottom corners, fading to cloth along edges of covers and at the spine, one-time owner's pencil signature on half-title page]. A screwball comedy in book form by the author of "Merton of the Movies," about a French prince who comes incognito to Hollywood, where he meets Stella, who is posing as a New York heiress but might also be a French (or possibly English) noblewoman. Wackiness ensues. Although Wilson himself never worked in Hollywood, he was at the forefront of American humor writing in the early decades of the twentieth century, and several of his earlier novels had been adapted for the screen (including "Merton," "Ruggles of Red Gap," and "Oh, Doctor!"). This novel, however, was both later and lesser than his best work; Hollywood novels bibliographer Anthony Slide observes that it "liberally borrows ideas from 'Merton of the Movies'," and that "despite the reference to talkies, the basic story belongs to a decade earlier." It also proved to be the last of Wilson's novels to be published during his lifetime, as the following year he was severely injured in a car accident. (He died in 1939.) .