Summer Brave, and Eleven Short Plays

New York: Random House. Near Fine in Very Good dj. (c.1962). First Edition. Hardcover. [good solid copy, with just a touch of age-toning to the top of the text block; the jacket is browned at the edges, with a few small surface-scrapes and some light soiling, and has been "stretched" a bit so it now fits a little loosely on the book (which is somewhat corrected by the new mylar jacket cover)]. A collection of lesser-known works by the great American playwright. Per Inge's preface, his famous play "Picnic," as originally presented in 1953, had "never completely fulfilled [his] original intentions," so at some later date (after the play had earned him both the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Critics' Circle Award, and had been adapted into a succesful movie), he dug back into his files for its "early version" -- "Summer Brave" -- and reworked it into the form published here. (He maintained that he preferred it to "Picnic," but nobody else seemed to agree. The jacket text refers to the play having been well-received when it was "presented in Hyde Park" in August 1962, but that was apparently a one-off: its Broadway premiere didn't come until 1975 -- two years after the playwright's death -- at which time it was a bit of a flop, running for only 18 performances.) The short plays, mostly written in the early 1950s, are: "To Bobolink, for Her Spirit"; "People in the Wind"; "A Social Event"; "The Boy in the Basement"; "The Tiny Closet"; "Memory of Summer"; "Bus Riley's Back in Town" (later expanded to full length, it too became a movie a few years after this volume was published); "The Rainy Afternoon"; "The Mall"; "An Incident at the Standish Arms"; and "The Strains of Triumph." .