The Interne

The Interne

Hardcover. Condición: Very Good. First Edition. (no dust jacket, but with the front panel illustration therefrom tipped in at the front of the book (see second scanned image) AND encased in a nice-looking facsimile reproduction of the original first edition jacket (see third image posted with this listing)) [a good sound copy, modestly shelfworn but with the binding fully intact, some light soiling and mild age-toning to the edges of the text block, a few small spots/stains at the top right corner of the front cover]. The last of the three novels by this major Harlem Renaissance figure, co-written with Abraham L. Furman, a white colleague at the Macaulay Company, the firm that was both Thurman's publisher (of all his novels) and his employer. (He had begun as a reader in the late 1920s and eventually was promoted to a top editorial position.) This book marked Thurman's second major collaboration with a white writer (the first was on his 1929 play "Harlem," co-written with William Jourdan Rapp), and unlike all his other work, including his earlier novels "The Blacker the Berry" (1929) and "Infants of the Spring" (1932), was not in any way concerned with the African-American experience. Rather, very much in the often-sensationalist Macaulay tradition, it was a somewhat lurid exposé -- "based on actual facts" -- of the appalling conditions at a large New York public hospital, told novelistically as the narrative of a young (white) intern. The hospital depicted (thinly diguised, as the saying goes, as "Memorial Hospital") is generally acknowledged to have been City Hospital on Welfare Island (previously known as Blackwell's Island; later renamed Roosevelt Island), a facility that had been opened in the 1860s and primarily served the city's poorer residents. A prefatory note in this book (a blurb preceding the title page) pulls no punches, describing "fire trap hospital buildings, insanitary wards, lack of men and equipment, administration riddled with politics, internes hardened to callousness, living a reckless life of drinking, gambling and woman chasing, and launched on racketeering careers." Ironically, a couple of years after the book's publication, Thurman -- never in the best of health -- returned from a brief screenwriting stint on the West Coast with what soon developed into a bad case of tuberculosis, and he was eventually admitted to this very hospital, where he died in December 1934 at the age of thirty-two. (I've seen it stated that the story of one of the movies Thurman scripted while in Hollywood -- TOMORROW'S CHILDREN, a low-budget "social problem" film themed around the topic of forced sterilization -- derived from an incident in this novel, but I could find no such reference therein.) NOTE again that this book bears a FACSIMILE dust jacket, which has not been factored in to our pricing. Nº de ref. del artículo: 20714

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