The Asphalt Jungle (First Edition)

BURNETT, W. R. The Asphalt Jungle. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949.

Octavo. Original publisher's pink decorative paper-covered boards. Original unclipped dust jacket. 271 pp. First edition, first printing. Two previous owners' signatures to front free endpaper.

William Riley Burnett (1899–1982) essentially invented the modern American gangster novel with his 1929 debut Little Caesar, and spent the following half-century as one of the most consistently adapted crime writers in American letters — the author of more than thirty novels and over sixty screenplays, including his own adaptation of High Sierra (1941). The Asphalt Jungle, published in 1949, extended the terrain Burnett had made his own: a jewel heist in an unnamed, thoroughly corrupt Midwestern city, told largely from the perspective of the criminals who plan and execute it rather than the police who pursue them. Unusually for a heist narrative, the greater part of the novel is devoted not to the robbery itself but to its meticulous planning and its ragged, disintegrating aftermath, as the gang's carefully laid arrangements come apart under the pressure of personal obsession, mutual suspicion, and plain bad luck. The New York Times praised Burnett's rendering of the corrupt city itself as so complete that "the reader breathes the air of menace that emanates from its implacable personality."

The novel's afterlife eclipsed even its considerable success on publication. Within a year, John Huston adapted it for the screen at MGM — reportedly greenlit by production chief Dore Schary over the explicit objections of studio head Louis B. Mayer, who dismissed the finished film as "trash... full of nasty, ugly people doing nasty things." Mayer's judgment has not survived contact with posterity. Huston's 1950 film, starring Sterling Hayden, Sam Jaffe, Louis Calhern, and featuring Marilyn Monroe in one of her earliest credited roles, is now regarded as one of the foundational works of the heist genre and among Huston's finest achievements as a director, earning four Academy Award nominations including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, and selected in 2008 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. Jules Dassin's Rififi (1955) — frequently cited as the greatest heist film ever made — is widely understood to have drawn directly on Huston's adaptation, whatever Dassin himself later claimed about the timing of his own viewing.

Burnett was consulted throughout the production of the screenplay and approved the final shooting script, giving the film an unusually direct line of continuity back to his own conception of the story. The novel's influence did not end there: it subsequently formed the basis for the MGM western The Badlanders (1958), the George Sanders vehicle Cairo (1963), and the blaxploitation film Cool Breeze (1972) — an unusually long afterlife for a single work of hardboiled crime fiction, and a measure of how completely Burnett's plot and characters had entered the wider vocabulary of American genre storytelling.

Very good in good dust jacket. Dust jacket unclipped, some age wearing at creases and edges, marking on front face under title. Bindings very good, square and tight, some age toning along edges and spine. Contents very good, some age toning on endpapers and edges, largely free of foxing with a few minor age spots. Two previous owners' signatures present on front free endpaper.

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Catalogue Number: HH000007