HOPPER, James; BECHDOLT, Fred R.
9009.
FIRST EDITION. New York: The McClure Company, 1908.
Original 1908 dust jackets are exceptionally rare survivals; most copies come down to the present in cloth alone. Octavo. 195 pp. Original blue cloth stamped in white. Dedicated "To One Who Wept." In the original publisher's dust jacket — vertical blue-green and tan stripes, $1.50 price intact on the front flap. Very good in very good dust jacket.
First serialized in The Saturday Evening Post in 1908, the book is James Hopper and Fred Bechdolt's "Fact-Story" — the authors' own term, from their preface, for their hybrid of investigative fact and novelistic narrative. It tells of John Collins, prisoner number 9009, a convict deserving of his sentence who enters prison hoping to make good and discovers a wholly corrupt system bent on breaking him by inches; the novel ends in calculated, bloodthirsty vengeance.
Hopper (1876–1956) was an exceptionally prolific journalist and short-story writer — some four hundred fifty short stories across the leading magazines of his era, alongside six novels. Bechdolt (1874–1950) brought the factual research and prison investigation that grounds the book. The unsentimental antihero sensibility more associated with mid-century crime fiction is already on the page here in 1908.
SKU TO-2026-082
