The Ecstasy of Owen Muir

First edition. 8vo. Pp. [iv], 272. Blue cloth boards, lettered and blocked in gilt to spine; beige endpapers. Precedes the Cameron & Kahn U.S. edition.

Dustjacket discoloured along spine, some chipping to upper flap fold corners and larger chip at crown of spine (not affecting lettering).

Author's first novel. A Candide-like tale about a young man's struggle to reconcile Roman Catholic dogma with the realities of early 1950s McCarthyite America.

A member of the U.S. Communist Party since 1936, Ring Lardner, Jr began writing the novel upon his release from a nine-month prison term served in Danbury Prison. At his 1947 appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), he had refused to testify by invoking the First Amendment. He therefore joined the so-called Hollywood Ten, comprising artists, screenwriters, directors, and various other professionals barred from studio work.

Lardner's blacklisting cut short a successful screenwriting career (he won an Academy Award with Michael Kanin in 1941 for Woman of the Year). He subsequently won another Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for M*A*S*H (1970), once the Hollywood ban was lifted, but he never revealed which other Lardner-penned screenplay won a third Academy Award because the writer acting as a front "was doing him a big favour".

A staffer's comment for the U.S. Senate Committee had summed up "The Ecstasy of Owen Muir [as] a novel of destruction. It blasts Catholicism, big business, private ownership, advertising, the prison system, judicial procedure, racial intolerance, and the United States Government. [...] The most vicious part of this slime is its attack on the Catholic Church [with] the rituals and beliefs of the church... sneered at." A contemporary Manchester Guardian review begged to differ: "It is not the Church Mr. Lardner mocks but its worldly tailors, cutting heavenly cloth to earthly patterns, and the Church is only the largest of many victims caught up here in their own mad, magnificent logistics."

His U.S. publisher, Angus Cameron, in his own deposition to HUAC explained that Cameron & Kahn was set up in 1953 in order "to publish some of the dissenting books that [were] not getting published by the regular publishing houses," due to the prevailing "intimidating atmosphere".

In 1955, the firm went on to publish False Witness, by Harvey Matusow, a book that John Steinbeck called "the straw that broke McCarthy's back." In it, the author, a paid informer confessed to having falsely accused 200 people of being Communists or Communist sympathizers. Cameron's co-publisher, Albert Kahn, was sentenced to six months' imprisonment for refusing to hand over to the authorities the manuscripts of the Matusow confessions. The sentence was rescinded only after the material was made available to the press.

[Strategy and Tactics of World Communism. The Significance of the Matusow Case: Hearings Before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, Eighty-Fourth Congress, First Session, on Mar. 7, 1955. Part 6, p. 1181. Washington: U.S. G.P.O, 1973.]