Meagher (Joseph W.) Tippy Locklin

London, Macdonald, 1961.

First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.

A comic and affectionate novel of a Brooklyn boyhood, covering the first eight years in the life of Tippy Locklin, born in Brooklyn in January 1920, among a wide cast of family, friends and neighbourhood characters. The jacket notes that on the day of his birth Tippy was very nearly deposited in the family dustbin by an affronted brother, and that one of his first acquaintances was a professional gambler. Mr Duffy, the tattooed cabdriver whose motto is “For God, Country, Mother and Girl Friend”, is a favourite with readers. The book was warmly received in America. Richard Sullivan in the New York Times Book Review called it “a small celebration of the very goodness of being alive”; Dan Wickenden in the New York Herald Tribune called it “a quiet, warm, funny and nostalgic book, and a literate one”; and Dorothy Parker, in a long review in Esquire, admitted: “I little thought that I should ever go on like this over a book about a small boy, especially one named Tippy.”

Joseph William Meagher (1917–2001) was himself a native of Brooklyn and drew on his own childhood. According to the publisher’s note to a 2018 reissue, he survived polio, wrote while working as a New York State employment interviewer, and studied under Saul Bellow at New York University, Bellow helping him to his first publisher.