Somewhere the Tempest Fell

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Near Fine in Very Good dj. 1947. First Edition. Hardcover. [nice clean copy, light wear to cloth at extremities, very minor bending at bottom corners of a few pages; jacket edgeworn but still attractive, a few tiny tears and some dog-earing along top edge, chip at top rear hinge of jacket that's taken the "S" in the title with it, unobtrusive closed tear at bottom of front panel]. Noted on the jacket blurb as "the first book since the war by one of the most important American woman novelists," this also proved to be the author's last published novel. A complex (too complex, in the eyes of most critics) philosophical tale of a group of disparate characters -- a mystery writer, a divorcee, a radical journalist, and others -- each of whom is in the midst of a personal crisis of some sort, it was a critical and commercial failure. Even Herbst's sympathetic biographer admits that "its tone is decisive but its content is vague [and] it is difficult to summarize because it is difficult to be certain what is being said." Its major strength is in its evocation of WWII-era Chicago; as the jacket blurb puts it, "Josephine Herbst records with equal ease the night life of jazz musicians and a literary tea at the Pump Room, a journalist's moving soliloquy on the suicide of Ernst Toller and the comedy of an odd household on the South Side." .