The Swiss Family Perelman - 1950

New York: Simon & Schuster, 1950. First Edition. S.J. Perelman’s own personal copy bound in full gilt-stamped red leather and presented to him by his publishers, Simon & Schuster. Handsomely bound with marble endpapers, raised bands, and top edge gilt. With a document providing provenance laid in. Illustrated by Al Hirschfeld. Fine copy. A collection of short travel pieces which appeared in ‘Holiday’ magazine, including ‘Rancors Aweigh,’ ‘Mamma Don’t Want No Rice,’ ‘Pickle-Puss in Seven-League Boots,’ ‘How Much Lotus Can You Eat?,’ etc. Sidney Joseph Perelman, popularly known as S. J. Perelman (1904 – 1979), was one of the most widely read literary icons of the Golden Age of American Humor. His New Yorker pieces, fiction, and collected essays are legendary for their biting wit and mastery of caricature and language. Off and on throughout his career he worked in film, notably as a contributing screenwriter on such Hollywood comedy classics as Monkey Business and Horse Feathers with the Marx Brothers, Mike Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days (for which he won an Oscar), co-creator of the hit Broadway musical comedy One Touch of Venus starring Mary Martin, as well as many publishing (including twenty-one books), radio, television, and travel writing ventures. He was the brother-in-law of the writer Nathanael West with whom he shared a close relationship up until West’s death in a car accident in 1940 at age thirty-seven, and whose memory and literary reputation he devoted himself to maintaining. His inner circle of literary and show-business friends and associates included F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Marx Brothers, Mike Todd, Harold Ross, T.S. Eliot, Al Hirschfeld, Bennett Cerf, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy Parker, Fred Allen, Kaufman and Hart, Ogden Nash, Ernest Hemingway, W. Somerset Maugham, etc. S.J. Perelman was a gifted man with conflicting desires living and working in complex times. While his writing brought much laughter to the world, his personal life reflected his restless spirit and inner struggles with his relationships to his family, friends, and intimates. Dorothy Herrmann ends her wonderful biography of Perelman with these insights: “…his genius was unique…highly literate and inventive, yet cranky and irreverent…perhaps no other modern writer was willing to match his commitment to words…Whether this was a rare gift or a feverish obsession is unimportant in the last analysis. For he made us forget for a brief time our own pain and sorrows – and enter a wild, wonderful realm of fantasy that was sublime.”