Description

Grossman Publishers, 1973. Hard cover, 327 pp. First Edition. Inscribed (personalized) and signed by CW Smith on front free end paper dated 2/7/74. Acceptable+ in acceptable+ dust jacket. Blue cloth covered boards with copper and black lettering on spine. Light bumping, scuffing and fading to edges and corners of covers. Light overall scuffing and soiling to covers as well. Spine slightly pulled with a thin line of yellowed glue exposed along the edge at the spine at the half-title page, but binding is still nice and tight. The last 30 pages have a 1" stain on the fore-edge. Pages are lightly aged, but are otherwise unmarked, with occasional light soiling and age spotting. Dust jacket has several small chips and tears and light creasing along the edges. Light overall scuffing and soiling to jacket as well. NOT price clipped. Light creasing to flaps. Now in an archival quality Brodart cover. NOT Ex-library. NO remainder marks. Author's first novel [From front jacket flap] ^ Méndez: a chicano, a ranch foreman thanks to fortunate circumstance, intellectual, and ambitious for himself and his people. Manuelo: his unemployed cousin, desperate, angry, and bent on avenging the wrongs he has suffered. Bond: ranch hand, buffoon, tale-spinner, a former preacher whose congregation now is Méndez. Houston: a Chicagoan who hopes to rebuild his life on the ranch he has just inherited. Four men who dream of the sky but are bound to the earth, who have cast themselves in roles but do not control the script, around whom C. W. Smith has built his remarkable first novel, Thin Men of Haddam. It is a rich and sweeping story, set in the Southwest, impregnated with regional humor and color, and distinguished by a sure sense of characterization and plotting. The novel is constructed of stories told by its characters and flashbacks involving Méndez, the protagonist, who struggles to reconcile his dreams with his hatred for the Anglos who alone can satisfy them, and to satisfy both his self-interest and his desire to be a martyr for his people. Its tension ever building, the novel moves inexorably to its climactic scene, a dead-of-night manhunt ¡n the rugged, semiarid hills of West Texas. Readers of Thin Men of Haddam will find echoes of Faulkner and Cervantes, but Smith is his own man, a writer whose major talents are fully displayed in this big, stemwinding novel of extraordinary authority, wit, and dramatic power.