The Merchant of Yonkers.

WILDER, Thornton.

$2,800.00

Item Number: 137443

New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1939.

First edition, inscribed by Wilder in the year of publication, the year after he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Our Town. Octavo, original cloth, pictorial endpapers. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author in the year of publication on the half-title page, “For Julie, coeur d’or with the lasting regard of Thornton, New York April 1939.” Also laid into is a ten line note signed Wilder. Near fine in a very good dust jacket. Jacket design by Donald McKay. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. First editions are rare and desirable signed and inscribed.

Wilder’s Merchant of Yonkers premiered in Boston and New York in 1938, the same year his play, Our Town, won the Pulitzer Prize. “Perhaps Wilder’s most popular work,” The Merchant of Yonkers was “his adaptation of one of Nestroy’s farces (Einen Jux will er sich machen, based on A Day Well Spent by John Oxenford). Merchant of Yonkers, later revised by Wilder and titled The Matchmaker, ran “in New York from December 1955 to February 2, 1957… The musical comedy version of the latter—Hello, Dolly!—ran in New York from January 16, 1964, to December 27, 1970” (Selected Letters, 364n). “A spectacular success,” Michael Stewart’s libretto for Hello, Dolly! closely followed Wilder’s comedy (Hartnoll, 892).