Seabiscuit: An American Legend.

HILLENBRAND, Laura [Tobey Maguire].

$1,200.00

Item Number: 144024

New York: Random House, 2001.

First edition of this best-selling work, basis for the unforgettable Academy Award-nominated film starring Tobey Maguire and Jeff Bridges. Octavo, original half cloth. Boldly signed by Laura Hillenbrand on the title page and additionally signed by actor Tobey Maguire on the title page. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Andy Carpenter.

Seabiscuit was one of the most electrifying and popular attractions in sports history and the single biggest newsmaker in the world in 1938, receiving more coverage than FDR, Hitler, or Mussolini. But his success was a surprise to the racing establishment, which had written off the crooked-legged racehorse with the sad tail. Three men changed Seabiscuit’s fortunes: Charles Howard was a onetime bicycle repairman who introduced the automobile to the western United States and became an overnight millionaire. When he needed a trainer for his new racehorses, he hired Tom Smith, a mysterious mustang breaker from the Colorado plains. Smith urged Howard to buy Seabiscuit for a bargain-basement price, then hired as his jockey Red Pollard, a failed boxer who was blind in one eye, half-crippled, and prone to quoting passages from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Over four years, these unlikely partners survived a phenomenal run of bad fortune, conspiracy, and severe injury to transform Seabiscuit from a neurotic, pathologically indolent also-ran into an American sports icon. “Fascinating . . . Vivid . . . A first-rate piece of storytelling, leaving us not only with a vivid portrait of a horse but a fascinating slice of American history as well" (The New York Times).