The Glass Room

FIRST US EDITION. 8vo. Original blue cloth, spine stamped in red. Top edge red. Patterned endpapers. Slight lean to spine, extremities bruised and worn. Musty, else clean. In the original dramatic mustard, blue and white illustrated dust jacket: price-clipped, soiled, chipped and creased, losses to spine ends. Good+/ good+ A solid copy of Edwin Rolfe's only foray into crime writing, of which the New York Times wrote: "the story is so fast and so tough that one is not surprised to learn that Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall are to star in the film version of it". Warner Brothers bought the film rights to The Glass Room almost immediately, hiring Rolfe and Fuller as screenwriters. With both men members of the Communist Party, however, the film was an early casualty "of the inquisition." The book fared better, with a British edition of The Glass Room appearing later the same year, published by Sampson Low, Marston & Co, and contracts for a French edition and for a Portuguese translation in Brazil following later. The Glass Room was also published as a 25-cent paperback by Bantam Books (no. 310) in 1948. Edwin Rolfe (born Solomon Fishman; 1910-1954) was a journalist, poet, Communist activist and veteran of the Spanish Civil War. He served with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, becoming the "unofficial poet laureate of the American volunteers". Following a move to Los Angeles, Rolfe worked briefly in Hollywood, before being blacklisted by the House of UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC); he went on to produce "the strongest body of anti-McCarthy poems of any American poet". Lester Fuller (1908-1962) was a writer and director, perhaps best known for Monte Carlo Baby (1951), which launched the career of Audrey Hepburn. Like Rolfe, he was blacklisted by HUAC.…