Georgie May by [RADICAL, PROLETARIAN, & SOCIAL LITERATURE] BODENHEIM, Maxwell - 1928

New York: Boni & Liveright, 1928. First Edition. Octavo (ca. 20cm.); publisher's cloth in pictorial dust jacket by Irving Politzer; 272pp. Light chipping and a few short closed tears to jacket extremities, spine very slightly sunned; Near Fine in Very Good, still quite brilliant jacket. Hard-boiled novel by the sometime vagrant novelist Maxwell Bodenheim, following the fate of Georgie May, a "vicious, sullen cocotte" living in an unnamed city in Arkansas. The work was published on the heals of Bodenheim and Liveright's obscenity trial for the former's earlier novel "Replenishing Jessica" (1925), advertised on the rear jacket panel: "Bodenheim is certainly an iconoclast--but there is no question of the perfect study he has made of a lustful woman, nor is there a single, offensive word in the book..." (St. Louis Globe-Democrat). Similarly, a contemporary critic wrote "'Georgie May' wallows in a sea of bilge, and is bound to nauseate the super-sensitive Bay State censors, though paradoxically there is nothing stench-like in Bodenheim's vivid novel" (Times Union (Brooklyn), June 3, 1928). HANNA 376.