La rue chaude

First edition of the French translation, one of 41 numbered copies on pur fil paper, the sole large-paper issue.

Spine and boards slightly and marginally faded, as often; two small spots of foxing in the left margin of the front board.

Algren's most celebrated novel alongside The Man with the Golden Arm, A Walk on the Wild Side owes part of its French fortune to Simone de Beauvoir, who introduced the Chicago writer into the Parisian existentialist circle after their meeting in 1947: their relationship, which lasted nearly seventeen years, fed a correspondence published in 1997 and inspired Beauvoir's character Lewis Brogan in The Mandarins (Prix Goncourt, 1954), which she dedicated to him. In 1962 the novel was adapted for the screen by Edward Dmytryk, starring Laurence Harvey, Capucine and Barbara Stanwyck, with a very young Jane Fonda, in one of her first notable roles, playing the drifter Kitty Twist.

A fine head copy of this classic of American noir fiction, doubly inscribed in French literary history through the figure of Simone de Beauvoir and in film history through Jane Fonda's early career.