Janie

New York: Dial Press. Very Good+ in Very Good+ dj. (c.1940). First Edition. Hardcover. [slight bumping to several corners, tiny stain on bottom of text block, one-time owner's signature on top of front pastedown; jacket is quite nice, with just a bit of wear at the spine ends]. A weirdly "lost" novel about "a real American girl -- her magnificent day-dreams, her jealous boyfriends, her strange enthusiasms, her searing disappointments, her tolerant but puzzled parents." Let me explain the "lost" business. A movie called JANIE was released by Warner Bros. in 1944; it starred Joyce Reynolds, then a 19-year-old ingenue whose career subsequently went nowhere (although, to be fair, she retired from the screen not long after this film, to marry a Marine), Robert Hutton (who at least had a career, albeit in a long string of mostly forgettable movies), and a stellar supporting cast that included Edward Arnold, Ann Harding, Robert Benchley, and Hattie McDaniel. This movie, as every single source in the universe will tell you, was based on a 1942 stage play, also called "Janie," which ran for 16 months (642 performances) on Broadway; the play was written by Josephine Bentham and Herschel Williams. But what goes absolutely unmentioned in most reference sources I've consulted (although it's acknowledged in contemporary reviews of the play) is THIS BOOK, which was obviously the original source for all that came after (including a 1944 film sequel, JANIE GETS MARRIED). The first movie's source is credited as the play only; the second movie was "based on characters created in the play..." I've looked at the original Warner Bros. press material for the film -- no mention of the book. I've checked the major references for literary source material for films -- all credit the play only. It's like the original book, for unfathomable reasons, has almost ceased to exist: there no copies of any description in commerce as of January 2020, although I'm relieved (because this was starting to get a little surreal) that there are, at least, eleven copies on the shelves of various U.S. libraries, per OCLC. Was this book banned, suppressed, censored, or otherwise shunned? It was well enough reviewed ("Warm and real and fun reading," said Kirkus Reviews), but its utter lack of an informational afterlife really throw me. Is it possible that what we've got here is the ONLY surviving copy outside the American library system? (Ordinarily I would look severely askance at any such claim made for any book, but this is honestly a case like no other I've ever encountered.) .