{"product_id":"9781477259719","title":"Characters and Plots in the Novels of Horace McCoy","description":"Tennessee-born Horace McCoy joined the American Air Service in WWI, was wounded flying over France, became a reporter-actor in Dallas.  In Hollywood, he was popular as a handsome actor, then toiled as a prolific movie-script writer.  McCoy burst into fame with his first novel, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, about Depression-era marathon dancers.  His No Pockets in a Shroud features a social climber bribed to have his marriage annulled by the bride’s rich father, then establishing a radical magazine.  I Should Have Stayed Home exposes Hollywood moguls and rich old women exploiting would-be actors and actresses.  Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye features warfare between a professional criminal and corrupt law-enforcement agents.  When made into a movie it starred Jimmy Cagney.  Additional films were based on McCoy’s fiction.  McCoy visited England and France where translations of his works were admired by existentialists.  Scalpel, his best-seller, features Tom Owen, a successful WWII military surgeon at odds with his superiors, including General Patton.  Owen returns to his Western Pennsylvania roots to investigate his brother’s death, is drawn into high-society--temporarily?  Well-educated Owen perhaps resembles what McCoy aspired to be.  But love of cars, wine, travel, and the high life clipped his wings.  He left Corruption City, a sixth novel, in fragmentary form--completed by a ghost writer and blasting yet another set of unclean cops and thieving politicians.  McCoy’s popularity in Europe may be better than in America, a land he loved and wished were cleaner.  This book begins with a chronology of major events in the life of Horace McCoy (1897-1955), and then in one alphabetized sequence synopsizes the plots of his six novels and identifies each of their 494 characters--often with critical comments by publishing scholars, including Gale.  It concludes with a select bibliography showing the range of scholarship on McCoy, then an index.","brand":"AuthorHouse","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47157391065328,"sku":"9781477259719","price":3.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781477259719_p0.jpg?v=1763613592","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781477259719","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}