Slim [*SIGNED*]

Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Near Fine in Near Fine dj. 1934. First Edition. Hardcover. [very nice copy, light shelfwear, a trace of foxing on fore-edge, bookplate on front pastedown; the jacket is remarkably clean and well-preserved, with some minor wear along the top and bottom edges, slight browning to spine, and one tiny nick mid-spine]. A beautiful copy of the author's first book, SIGNED by him directly beneath his printed signature on the title page, and just above one of illustrator Robert Lawson's drawings of the title character. Haines began working as a telephone lineman during summer vacations while in college (University of Pennsylvania), and took on the work full-time upon his graduation in 1931. His experiences on that job provided fodder for his literary efforts, including his first published short stories and two novels, this one and the subsequent "High Tension" in 1937. Time Magazine said of this novel that "in celebrating his craft and the men who pursue it, [the author] has not overlooked the fact that novel writing is also a craft in itself. He has mastered the new calling as thoroughly as his hero, Slim, mastered the job of wire stringing. The tale is by turns hard-boiled, sentimental, tragic, humorous. But the toughness, the sentiment, the tragedy and the humor all belong to a man's world." The success of "Slim" put Haines on the path to Hollywood -- Warner Bros. bought the novel and hired him to write the adaptation (the film, starring Henry Fonda, was released in 1937), and he stuck around and wrote a dozen or so screenplays over the next 25 years. (Notable credits were BLACK LEGION, THE TEXANS, and THE WINGS OF EAGLES; the 1948 film COMMAND DECISION was based on his novel and play.) I suspect this novel has a cult following among telephone linemen and/or collectors of memorabilia related thereto -- in fact, at one point on there was even a line of "Slim" t-shirts reproducing one of the wonderful Lawson "decorations" that are sprinkled throughout the text. Signed by Author .