THE BLUE CUP AND OTHER STORIES

New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc, 1957. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good / Good Plus. Octavo, 5.3 x 8.2 in., ppp. 221. Light blue boards with dark blue title to cover and spine. Light rubbing to extremities. Top edges of boards lightly faded. Age-toning to endpapers. Chips to top of spine and fore-edges of price-clipped dustjacket. Light sunning to dustjacket spine. Protected in mylar. The author's first collection of twelve works of short fiction. The stories were originally published in The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Good Housekeeping, and other magazines.

"Chute reportedly published her first story before she was 20. Much of her early work was adventure and sports stories for boys, such as "Oh, Say Can You Ski?" (Boys' Life, January 1938), and this probably inspired her to use her initials as a pen name to disguise her gender, as many female writers did at the time. She continued to write similar material, as well as romance stories for women's magazines, through much of the 1940s, including several sports-themed novels - Blocking Back (1938), Shattuck Cadet (1941), and Shift to the Right (1944). In 1956 Chute published her first major work aimed at the adult market, The Fields are White, a novel of marriage and manners. After this her production of genre short stories declined.

In 1956 she published Greenwillow, her most successful work. The book was a fable set in the fictional village of Greenwillow. A critic called it "a deeply moving, gently humorous and serenely wise" story of young love and self-discovery.[4] It went on to be a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1957, and was the basis for a modestly successful 1960 Frank Loesser Broadway musical, Greenwillow. She published novels, children's books, and books of short stories and edited one with a Christmas theme (Behold that Star, 1966). Her last book was The Good Woman (1986)."