"So Little Time" and "Point of No Return". Two Complete Novels by John Marquand, published by Little Brown & Company, Boston, 1961. First US Book Club Edition issued one month after the first print of the 1st US trade edition.

Dust jacket with Book Club Edition imprinted on the front flap [a little edge wear]; hard boards with gold lettering on spine [a little shelf wear], 5.3/4" x 8.3/4"; 792 pages, very good condition.

"John Marquand's novels were big sellers in their time, and while they are as relevant and readable today as when they first appeared, they have fallen into a state of nearly complete neglect (only "The Late George Apley," which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1938, and "Wickford Point" are still in print). Over the last few years, at least two prominent literary critics have written pieces hoping to spark interest in Marquand's work. Jonathan Yardley began a 2003 write-up on Marquand in The Washington Post by saying that "It is just about impossible for me to imagine beginning this series of essays about books of yesterday - books I remember with affection and admiration, but have not read in many years, books I would like to encourage others to discover - with anything except a novel by John Phillips Marquand. His are not the best books I have ever read, but they are among the books I love most, and the neglect into which they have fallen is a literary outrage." [a review]

The story of a boy from a small New England town, aviator in World War I, then newspaper man, play doctor, movie script rewriter. The story of his married life, his work, his worries, his search for security, his attempt to adjust himself to changing times and environment. It is the story of some good Americans who didn't want to face the probability of total war in the twenty months before Pearl Harbor. Made into the 1941 King Vidor film featuring Hedy Lamarr and Robert Young.

"Marquand came from some prominent New England families that had fallen on hard times. As such (a poor boy and because of that somewhat of an outsider) he wrote about the New England-Mid Atlantic "upper crust" with a slightly jaundiced and sarcastic review. So Little Time is a very good picture of that society's opinions and conduct in the last year or two before the US was engaged in the start of WW II. The protagonist is a decent man who's made a lucrative career as a "script doctor" fixing stage and movie plays that just don't work as originally written. He's been married a long time to a wealthy woman (who is coming from a way of life in Connecticut that will soon be extinct). As someone who's been married a long time myself, some of the byplay between husband and wife sounds awfully familiar, albeit my wife and I are from a different place and era." [a review]

A #1 New York Times bestseller by a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist: A successful Manhattan banker is haunted by his humble New England roots. Raised in the small town of Clyde, Massachusetts, Charles Gray has worked long and hard to become a vice president at the privately owned Stuyvesant Bank in Manhattan. But at the most crucial moment of his career, when his focus should be on reading his boss’s intentions and competing with his chief rival for promotion, Charles finds himself hopelessly distracted by the past.

Years ago, the Gray family was featured in a sociological study of their hometown. Charles, his sister, and their parents were classified as members of the “lower-upper class,” the unspoken strains of their tenuous social status cast in stark black and white. A chance encounter with the author of the study fills Charles’s head with memories—and when a business matter compels him to return to Clyde, it seems as if fate is intent on turning back the clock. As he reflects on the defining moments of his youth, Charles contends with one of the central mysteries of existence: how our lives can feel both predetermined and random at the same time.

Published in 1949, Point of No Return is a brilliant study of character and place heralded by the New York Times as "further proof that its author is one of the most important living American novelists."

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