[McMURTRY, Larry (1936-2021), his copy]. ROTH, Henry (1906-1995). Call It Sleep. New York: Robert O. Ballou, [1934].

Large 8vo. Original light blue cloth, gilt-lettered spine on blue background, black top stain (light sunning to spine, else fine); original dust jacket by the muralist Stuyvesant Van Veen (spine sunned, some light chipping at extreme ends). Provenance: Larry McMurtry (his bookplate, which he designed, features the horseshoe-shaped brand his father and grandfather used on the McMurtry cattle), from his personal library at his home in Archer City.

FIRST EDITION OF THE AUTHOR’S FIRST BOOK in the rare first issue dust jacket uncommon in this condition. Call It Sleep tells the tale of a young Jewish immigrant growing up in New York’s Lower East Side in the early 20th century. The work was hailed as a modernist masterpiece upon publication, but despite critical acclaim it sold poorly and remained out of print until its return to prominence in the 1960s when critics hailed the work as an overlooked masterpiece and “one of the great achievements of American writing this century” and the finest Jewish-American novel of the age (Parker & Kermode, 181). In a 2014 interview, Larry McMurtry hailed this work as a great novel and a book that he was happy to own: “It’s the only good book by old Mr. Roth, who ended his days in a trailer camp in Albuquerque. He went silent for forty years. Then, at the end of his life, he published a lot of second-rate stuff that’s not very good. This is a great book. It’s a very Jewish book. And it isn’t rare. I mean, I’ve handled it maybe three times, but that’s a nice copy I found [this copy], and I just decided to keep it. And it has a spectacular dust wrapper” (see Spurgeon, Talking with Larry McMurtry in SAL, Vol 40, Issue 1, Fall 2014).