Warlock.
“The pursuit of truth, not of facts, is the business of fiction": First Edition of Oakley Hall's Warlock; Finely Bound by The Harcourt Bindery; Signed by Him
Warlock.
HALL, Oakley.
$2,500.00
Item Number: 143509
New York: The Viking Press, 1958.
First edition of this classic of American West literature. Octavo, bound in full morocco by the Harcourt bindery, gilt titles and tooling to the spine in six compartments within raised gilt bands, gilt ruling to the front and rear panels, gilt inner dentelles stamp-signed by the Harcourt Bindery, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt. Signed by Oakley Hall on a page bound in. In near fine condition.
Oakley Hall's legendary Warlock revisits and reworks the traditional conventions of the Western to present a raw, funny, hypnotic, ultimately devastating picture of American unreality. First published in the 1950s, at the height of the McCarthy era, Warlock is not only one of the most original and entertaining of modern American novels but a lasting contribution to American fiction. "Also in '59 we simultaneously picked up on what I still think is among the finest of American novels, Warlock, by Oakley Hall. We set about getting others to read it too, and for a while had a micro-cult going. Soon a number of us were talking in Warlock dialogue, a kind of thoughtful, stylized, Victorian Wild West diction" (Thomas Pynchon). It is the basis for the 1958 film directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring Richard Widmark, Henry Fonda, Anthony Quinn and Dorothy Malone.