Warlock.

HALL, Oakley.

$4,800.00

Item Number: 140967

New York: The Viking Press, 1958.

First edition of this classic of American West literature. Octavo, original half cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the title page, “To Jim Dunham with best wishes Oakley Hall UCI 89.” The recipient, Jim Dunham was a historian and friend of the authors. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Charles Egri and Evelyn Curro. An exceptional example, rare and desirable signed by the author.

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.