"CALL ME SHANE": FIRST EDITION OF THE CLASSIC WESTERN, SIGNED BY JACK SCHAEFER

SCHAEFER, Jack. Shane. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949. Octavo, original beige cloth, original dust jacket. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. $12,000.

First edition of this timeless American western, basis for the Oscar-winning film with Alan Ladd, boldly signed by the author.

At its publication in 1949, journalist Jack Schaefer's novel about tension between frontier homesteaders and cattle barons as seen through the eyes of a young boy was immediately recognized as a near-mythic accomplishment, a western in which Schaefer used finely realized characters and "a simple story to advance a complex argument" (Literary History of the American West). In 1985, Shane was named the all-time best Western novel by the Western Writers of America. The Oscar-winning 1953 screen adaptation by director George Stevens starred Alan Ladd as the heroic gunfighter, along with Jack Palance and Brandon De Wilde in a film praised as "magnificent… a rich and dramatic mobile painting of the American frontier scene" (New York Times). Bookplate of science fiction author Joseph Payne Brennan and smaller bookplate of notable collector William A. Strutz.

Book and dust jacket lightly worn with some professional restoration. A very good signed copy, scarce thus.