KLEIN, Joe. [Anonymous] [Stephen J. Cannell].
Primary Colors.
New York: Random House, 1996.
$1,250.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-152841
+$500
First Edition of Primary Colors; Inscribed by Its Once-Anonymous Author Joe Klein to Celebrated Television Writer Stephen J. Cannell
First edition, early printing of the notorious anonymous bestseller of the 1992 Clinton campaign, the roman à clef whose secret authorship became a national guessing game until the columnist Joe Klein was unmasked as its author. Octavo, original red half cloth, in the original dust jacket. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “For Stephen J. Cannell, With Great Admiration (and one of the first of my new signatures), All Best, Anonymous JK." The recipient, Stephen J. Cannell, was the celebrated television writer and producer behind The Rockford Files, The A-Team, and 21 Jump Street, and later a best-selling novelist. Klein’s parenthetical note that this is “one of the first of my new signatures” refers to his signing openly as the author after his identity, long the subject of feverish speculation, was revealed through handwriting analysis in July 1996. Fine in a fine dust jacket. A remarkable association copy, signed by the once-anonymous author just as his secret came out and inscribed to a giant of American television.
Primary Colors (1996) is a thinly veiled roman à clef about a charismatic, philandering Southern governor’s run for the presidency, universally understood as a portrait of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. An immediate number-one bestseller, it set off one of the great literary whodunits of the decade as journalists, scholars, and even computers pored over the text to identify “Anonymous.” In July 1996, after a Vassar professor’s analysis of the writing pointed to him, the Newsweek and CBS political columnist Joe Klein at last admitted, following months of flat denials, that he was the author. The novel was adapted into a 1998 film directed by Mike Nichols, with John Travolta and Emma Thompson as the candidate and his wife and Kathy Bates in an Academy Award-nominated performance.
Primary Colors.
$1,250.00
In Stock