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First Edition (SD). This was Maurice Samuel's second book and second novel. His first book was titled The Outsider. Neither book is for sale anywhere on the Internet. Until now. And amazingly, this book, from 1923, still has its dust jacket. You can see how clean the red covers are, front, spine, and rear. The gilt lettering on both front and spine is very bright. The six edges are in top-notch shape. The four corners have only tiny bits of rubbing, no rub-through. The spine ends have the usual crinkling/bending, with a speck-sized scuff at the bottom one. There are two tiny indents on the spine. The page edges look very good. The top page edge had a darker original stain ( dye). It's somewhat lightened now. I don't see any soiling or staining on any of the three page edges. The book is square. The spine is straight. The binding is very solid from cover to cover with nicely tight pages and nicely tight covers as well. I found only one instance of a very thin space between two facing pages. Both pages are tightly bound from top to bottom. The pages, while toned, are exceptionally clean. I saw two consecutive pages with a tan spot at the margin in the same place. I found one instance of what appears to be a faded bit of print overrun, also at a margin, nothing much of anything. That's it. I found one top corner crease and one teeny tiny edge tear. There are no markings. No attachments. And no one has written their name or anything else anywhere in the book. You have to give a little allowance to a nearly 100-year-old dust jacket. You can see it in the first three photos. I've always had it in a fitted protective cover. There are a few small losses. The one at the top edge of the spine does not reach the lettering. There are a few small ones at the middle of the jacket, one off the top edge of the rear. There's some scuffing at the front middle edge, a tear off the top edge of the front, an almost tear on the rear cover adjacent to its middle edge, all in all not too bad. My rating of Very Good Minus takes into account its age. I hope it's not disrespectful to put a minus on the rating of an elderly jacket. The flaps almost managed to be perfect. There's a small stain off the front top edge. There are no tears. A tiny bit of the small loss at the top middle edge can be seen at the top corner of the rear flap. The jacket is NOT price-clipped, not clipped at all. Here is what it has to say about the book you're about to buy: 'A novel in which the passionate struggle between an idealistic son and his successful father uncovers the revolt of young America against the strangle-hold of the success school: the bitter cry of a pure mind against the deadly intrusion of business psychology into the innermost recesses of art, beauty, patriotism, and friendship. Interwoven with the record of the fight between father and son is a strange love-story, the attraction of two untarnished natures and the culmination of their battle to preserve their ideals from corruption.' You can see this was the work of a young Maurice Samuel. This book was published when he was 28 years old. He wrote five other novels, but twenty works of nonfiction, the majority of them focused on or related to his Judaism. The last was published 52 years after this book. This book was previously owned by his daughter who was friendly with my aunt when they were both living in the same retirement community near Princeton, NJ. 'Maurice Samuel was a Romanian-born British and American novelist, translator and lecturer. His parents spoke Yiddish at home and he developed strong attachments to the Jewish people and the Yiddish language at early age. This later became the motivation for many of the books he wrote as an adult. He and his work received acclaim within the Jewish community during his lifetime, including the 1944 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for his non-fiction work, The World of Sholom Aleichem. He received the Itzik Manger Prize for Yiddish literature posthumously.'.
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