Wertenbaker, Charles [1901 - 1955] — BEFORE THEY WERE MEN

New York: Horace Liveright, Inc, 1931. 1st Edition. Orange cloth binding with black stamped lettering to backstrip. Black topstain. Multi-color dust jacket. [8], 269, [3 (blank)] pp. Crown 8vo. 7-5/8" x 5-1/4" Wertenbaker's initial day job was as a journalist for Time, today perhaps best remembered in that capacity for his work during WWII as the magazine's foreign editor. Towards the end of the war, Wertenbaker reported from Paris, where he knew people like Ernest Hemingway and Irwin Shaw. He was one of many journalist who hung out at the Bar in the Hotel Scribe, as painted by colleague Floyd MacMillan Davis in Paris in 1945. After the war, he remained in France, where he continued as both journalist and author. This his 3rd novel, a story of two adolescent boys ['Sleepy'& 'Shadow'], which is somewhat uncommon in commerce [e.g. at the time of cataloguing, we see no others on offer]. Square & tight, VG+ in a lightly worn VG - VG+ jacket, with an unobtrusive closed tear to the front panel's upper right & a sun-tanned spine panel.