INSCRIBED BY WILLIAM PETER BLATTY

BLATTY, William Peter. Which Way to Mecca, Jack? (New York): Bernard Geis, (1960). Octavo, original half red cloth, original dust jacket. $450.

First edition of the witty semi-autobiographical account published nearly a decade before Blatty wrote The Exorcist, inscribed by him with a reference to the illustration of a camel on the same page, "To Enid & Bob—May your lives never be like this camel's back—(see p. 14)—and here's to that magnificent apartment in Brentwood! Peg & I are grateful for this refreshing breath of the East—All the best, Bill Blatty."

In Which Way to Mecca, Jack?, a narrator named "Bill Blatty" recounts life as the child of Lebanese immigrant parents in New York and a brief try at acting in Hollywood, where he is deemed unfit as "The Type" and "Def-initely not Biblical." On enlisting with the U.S. Information Agency in the 1950s, he is stationed in Beirut where this time the challenge is to "prove my worthiness as an American by being an Arab." On returning to the U.S., he once again makes Hollywood his battleground, briefly posing as a Saudi Arabian prince about to meet "a casting agent named Destiny." After a successful career as a screenwriter and novelist in the 1960s, in 1971 William Peter Blatty published The Exorcist, which he adapted to the screen and produced in 1973—thereby changing "the course of contemporary horror fiction and film" (Magistrale, Dark Night's Dreaming, 84). "First printing" stated on copyright page.

Book fine, only light edge-wear, faint toning to spine of near-fine dust jacket.