Lovey Childs: A Philadelphian’s Story.

New York: Random House, 1969. Signed limited first edition of this novel by the author of Appointment in Samarra, number 166 of 200 examples. Octavo, original cloth. Fine in the original acetate dust jacket in the fine publisher's cardboard slipcase. Lovey Lewis's efforts to join the adult world were aided by matters she could not foresee or control - her father's financial ineptitude, his early death, her mother's aberrations. At seventeen she completed the process by her impetuous marriage to Sky Childs, all-American (football), wealthy and worthless. . . . The main events of the story take place in the second half, the downhill side of the hectic 1920's, a period about which the author has frequently written before with equal authority and conviction. This is one of John O'Hara's shortest novels, . . . but its brevity is a matter of method rather than of content. It is a long full-bodied story deliberately foreshortened, presented primarily through key scenes, with the connecting links sketched in briefly or suggested to the imagination. The characters are seldom described; it is through what they do and say that the reader comes to know them, and also, in some cases with reluctance, to believe them.