The Ecstasy of Owen Muir.

New York: Cameron & Kahn, 1954. First American edition of Ring Lardner Jr.'s witty Candide-like satire. Octavo, original cloth. Signed by Ring Lardner on the title page. Near fine in a very good dust jacket. In The Ecstasy of Owen Muir, a new-comer from America, Ring Lardner, Jr., finds his targets with deadly discretion. His hero, Owen, young, upper middle class, searches for truth in living , from his first pacifist failure, through the Army, into business, to marriage and conversion to Roman Catholicism. He is not stupid, just intelligently over-insistent on principles: imagining that if you knock with a good will it will be opened to you, he is surprised to find a world of revolving doors. He is subjected to every kind of contemporary double-talk, especially the Roman Catholic kind, as he marries a Catholic girl and embraces his new faith so thoroughly that he loses her. It is not the Church Mr. Lardner mocks but its worldly tailors, cutting heavenly cloth to earthly patterns, and the Church is only the largest of many victims caught up here in their own mad, magnificent logistics... Business and advertising men, psycho-analysts and legal reformers, even the cop on the corner, are surprised by their private hall of mirrors" (The Manchester Guardian).