Grenadine's Spawn: A Novel of Our Times

1st Edition 1952, Doubleday & Co., Garden City, New York. Octavo, 14, 5 x 21cm; 253pp. Grey cloth boards with illustration in red on front board and red cursive titles to spine. Rough cut front edge. With dustjacket.

Ruark’s first novel, Grenadine Etching (1947), lampooned historical romances that were all the rage at the time.  This is the sequel.

Kirkus Review: ‘This sequel to is compounded of the same ingredients again aplied to the current social scene, and embodies a columnist's carps on a variety of things. With the fabulous Grenadine's death her four sons, Abercrombie, Peter, Jeter and Uranium, and a vaguely remembered other offspring (who turns out to be omnipresent Opal) take over her empire and positions in the military, moving pictures, science and propaganda...as World War II and Korea came over the pike. A widespread spatter-pattern of hard, and fogged, hits, this has fun with newspapers, advertising, publishing, economics and other discussed areas, and ends with Uranium blowing up the world..... The broadness and baldness of the lampooning blurs the sharp outline of what superior goofer dust can do.’

Robert Chester Ruark Jr., was born in Wilmington, N.C., on 29 December 1915. He started college at age 15 at the University of North Carolina and  graduated with an A.B. in journalism in June 1935. He worked as a journalist for various newspapers until the war. During World War II, he joined the Navy as a gunnery officer and later became a press censor the Pacific. He returned to the Washington Daily News in 1945 to become a syndicated columnist. In his column, Ruark revealed a gift for expressing aversion both facetiously and ungrammatically, poking fun at his uneducated "hick." He aimed his stinging wit at psychiatrists, Southern cooking, army generals, the state of Texas, progressive schools, scheming women, and other pet peeves.  His sharpest assaults were collected in two books, I Didn’t Know It Was Loaded (1948) and One for the Road (1949). During this time, he began writing Grenadine Etching, published in 1947. It was followed by  Grenadine's Spawn (1952).

After 1950, Ruark began spending time in Africa. In 1953, he published Horn of the Hunter : The Story of an African Hunt, about an African safari, and Something of Value in 1955. Something of Value, based on the Mau Mau uprisings, was a major success. He made over a million dollars on the royalties and the film rights which he sold to Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Ruark permanently settled in Spain. There he wrote his three autobiographical novels, The Old Man and the Boy (1957), Poor No More (1959), and The Old Man's Boy Grows Older (1961). In 1962 he published another work on race relations in Africa, Uhuru; his last book was The Honey Badger published in 1964. He died in June 1965.

Condition: Age toning to the book and edges with a small stain on the bottom edge, which is visible at the extreme bottom of the pages. Stain to bottom of rear pastedown. The protected dustjacket has worn edges with small chips, and chips to the spine tips. Stain to bottom of rear wrap. Overall Good.