Waterfront.

SCHULBERG, Budd.

$1,250.00

Item Number: 131837

New York: Random House, 1955.

First edition of Schulberg’s novel adapted from his Academy Award–winning screenplay. Octavo, original beige cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author in the year of publication on the front free endpaper, “For Kent and Marjorie McKinley. How salutary that you can live on this serene waterfront and still weep bitter tears for the turbulent waterfront described herein. Yours, cordially, Budd Schulberg. Sarasota. Oct. 23. 1955.” The recipient, Kent Schuyler McKinley began his newspaper the Sarasota News in 1954 with the stated ambition of building a two-party system in Florida and promoting ‘states’ rights’. McKinley was a major figure in Florida’s transition to Republican power. He was elected to the state legislature, and Sarasota became Florida’s first county in the twentieth century to have more Republicans registered than Democrats (Lawrence). Fine in a near fine dust jacket without the usual fade to the spine panel, bookplate of McKinley to the front pastedown. An exceptional example.

Building on his Academy Award-winning screenplay of the classic film, Budd Schulberg's On the Waterfront is the story of ex-prizefighter Terry Malloy's valiant stand against corruption on the New Jersey docks. It generates all the power, grittiness, and truth of that great production, but goes beyond it in set and setting. It is a novel of strength and fallibility, of hope and defeat, of love and betrayal. "Intensely personalized, white-hot fiction with all the menace, suspense, narrative flow, fresh characterization and social message anybody could reasonably expect in a novel It’s the best of Schulberg, a full-fledged performance by a gifted American writer" (New York Times). Elia Kazan directed the film On the Waterfront, starring Marlon Brando and features Karl Malden, Lee J. Cobb, Rod Steiger, Pat Henning, and, in her film debut, Eva Marie Saint. The soundtrack score was composed by Leonard Bernstein and received twelve Academy Award nominations, winning eight, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Brando, Best Supporting Actress for Saint, and Best Director for Kazan. In 1997 it was ranked by the American Film Institute as the eighth-greatest American movie of all time. In 1989, the film was deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.