Description

G. P. Putnam's Sons, Published 1965. Hardcover, 320 pp.; 22 cm. In Very Good condition with a Good dust jacket. Publisher's quarter-cloth binding: red cloth spine with gold lettering and a small gold-stamped figure of a man with arms raised, orange paper over boards with the same gold-stamped figure at the lower right of the front board. Top edge of the text block stained red. Mild shelf wear with light bumping to the corners and a hint of color loss along the edges. Binding tight; mild toning to the endpapers and a small stain to the last page of text and rear free endpaper; otherwise pages unmarked. Cream-colored pictorial dust jacket with a photographic image of Levant on the front and a black-and-white photograph of him at the piano (by Julian Wasser) on the back; jacket design by Ben Feder. Dust jacket shows several small nicks, chips and short closed tears (each one inch or less) at the spine ends and corners, mild to moderate overall toning with light soiling, and heavier toning to the paper over the spine; unclipped at $5.95. Now in an archival quality (removable) Brodart cover.Oscar Levant (1906-1972), a pianist, composer, radio and television personality, film actor, and self-described professional neurotic, looks back across four decades of American musical and theatrical life in this informal autobiography, his successor to A Smattering of Ignorance. Levant moves between recollections of Arnold Schoenberg, Toscanini, George Gershwin, Harpo Marx, Clifford Odets, Aldous Huxley, Al Jolson, S. N. Behrman, and Christopher Isherwood; accounts of his Tin Pan Alley apprenticeship, his Information Please years, and his Hollywood and concert-hall career; and chapters on his struggles with addiction, mental illness, and treatment at the psychiatric ward of Mt. Sinai Hospital.Contents: Total Recoil; Little Boy's Blues; Woe Is I; Blame It on My Youth; Leaves of Trash; Hats Off, Gentlemen!; Variations on No Theme; The Real Tinsel; Duet for Three Hands; My Bed of Nails; Stand Up and Faint.