The Human Comedy (First Edition)

A landmark of wartime American fiction: a rejected film script, reworked into a bestselling novel, only afterward becoming the celebrated film it was originally meant to be.

William Saroyan (19081981), the Armenian-American writer already celebrated as one of the most distinctive voices in American theatre and short fiction, came to The Human Comedy through an unusual back door. MGM’s Louis B. Mayer had commissioned Saroyan to write a screenplay treatment for the studio; when his 240-page draft proved too unwieldy for production, the assignment was reassigned to another screenwriter, and Saroyan, dropped from his own project, walked off the studio lot and reworked his rejected treatment into a novel instead.

Published in February 1943, just ahead of the film’s release, the novel has ever since been popularly assumed to be the source from which the film was adapted, when in fact the reverse is true: Saroyan’s original screen story came first, and it was for that original story, rather than the eventual screenplay credited to Howard Estabrook, that Saroyan won the Academy Award for Best Story in 1944.

Set in the fictional Californian town of Ithaca the novel follows fourteen-year-old Homer Macauley, a telegraph messenger boy tasked with delivering both the ordinary correspondence and the devastating casualty notifications of a nation at war. The book was an immediate and substantial commercial success, spending fifteen weeks on theNew York Times bestseller. The novel’s enduring significance to the literature of California has been formally recognised through its inclusion on the celebrated Zamorano 80, the definitive list of the most significant works of Californiana ever compiled.

First edition, first printing. The author’s first novel. Octavo. ix, 291pp. Original cloth boards. Lettering and illustrations to covers in black. Original unclipped pictorial dust jacket. Very good in good dust jacket. Mild age toning to dust jacket, particularly along edges. Some wearing and chipping at edges near spine and creases. Binding tight. Contents near fine, almost completely free from age markings and foxing. Some very minor browning along top edge.

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Catalogue Number: HH000044