MOTT THE HOOPLE by Manus, Willard - 1966

New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1966. 250 pp. Quarter-bound in Navy blue on purple boards; lettered in orange and white on the spine; red upper edge. Wear at the corners of the dustjacket with a few nicks around the edges; L-shaped tear on the upper left corner of the front panel with associated creasing, wrapping onto the spine; light chipping at the head of the spine; price intact; remains of a book plate on the front free endpaper; tape marks on the boards; previous owner's name inked out on the front free endpaper; store stamped. Norman Mott is a lazy rebel without a cause who dislikes work and borrows money from his girlfriend Sandra. In order to avoid real work, he engages in various scams and he gambles but he is a bad gambler which means he must keep up his scams. To evade the draft, to avoid being sent to Vietnam, he starts to wander. He becomes a ticket seller at a state fair where he becomes involved with the denizens of the freak show and engages in various con games. When drafted, he refuses to be inducted into the Army and is sentenced to prison. The story opens with its lead character, the overweight, lazy, yet fancifully imaginative Norman Mott driving into town to gamble and visit his girlfriend, the beautiful Sandra Patterson, at college. He attempts to make love to Sandra but is thwarted by her sexual repression at the hands of her mother, who is a disciple of the evangelist Reverend Smiley Harley Gurrey, a Billy Graham type. Between her mother's influence and the experience of being tricked into a sham marriage as a teenager, Sandra is so apprehensive about sex that she becomes extremely flatulent every time a man makes sexual advances to her.... First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good-/Very Good-. Illus. by Richard Karwoski;. 8vo. Book.