Lovey Childs: A Philadelphian’s Story.

O'HARA, John.

$20.00

Item Number: 126114

New York: Random House, 1969.

First edition of this novel by the author of Appointment in Samarra. Octavo, original cloth. Near fine in a very good dust jacket. Jacket design by Muriel Nassar.

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.