Anna Malleen 1911 George H. Brennan ~Antique Novel of Theater Life ~Scarce

Title: Anna Malleen

Author: George H. Brennan

Description: Boards in maroon cloth with gilt lettering on spine and front cover. Edges are well-rubbed and cloth shows scuffing. Fore-edge of text block shows some incidental soiling. Previous owner's name on front free endpaper. Finger smudges on a few pages, else interior is clean. 377 pages. Eight institutional copies located on OCLC (Harvard, Yale, Vassar, NYPL, UPenn, Syracuse U, etc.). A scarce copy.

The heroine of this tale, Anna Malleen, is a young girl from the small-town of Preston, Texas who becomes stage-struck and determined to become an actress. She arrives in New York and encounters a variety of struggles and moral perils associated with the theatre scene. Anna Malleen became the basis for the 1915 silent film ''The Luring Lights,'' directed by Robert G. Vignola for Kalem Pictures.

Anna Malleeen was the second theatrically-themed novel by George H. Brennan (1865-1934), a native and resident of Fall River, Massachusetts, who was himself a touring theater manager and director. The publisher of his first novel, which was titled Bill Truetell, was sued by another theater director who claimed that he had been caricatured and had his professional reputation damaged by the book. Also notably, as a theater manager, Brennan had a close working relationship with Thomas Dixon Jr., the author of The Clansman. Brennan had toured two of Dixon's plays, ''The Sins of the Father'' and ''The Clansman,'' and thought that he had the legal rights to make the film of The Clansman, which D. W. Griffith did with The Birth of a Nation, and later sued for royalties. In 1916, he was working with George Bernard Shaw to arrange his tour of the United States, but the British government restricted Shaw from traveling, due to his outspoken criticism of the government and war issues.

Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Good+

Publisher: Mitchell Kennerley
Place: London and New York
Year: 1911

Keywords: novel, fiction, Texas, theater, Southern Amusement Company, books into film, The Luring Lights,