Powder Keg, The.
Marion, Frances. The Powder Keg. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, (1953).
8vo.; blue cloth; dust-jacket; light internal foxing; price-clipped; light edge-wear.
First edition of “a novel of women in prison—of the crimes that put them there and the conditions they live under as they pay their debt to society” (dust-jacket). Based on research performed during her investigations for The Big House, as well as subsequent interviews conducted with this project in mind, Marion states boldly on the dust-jacket: “There is no damning statement in this book which can’t be proved as fact.”
A presentation copy, inscribed on the title page: Bon Voyage to Pen Hogan. Here’s hoping that you come back from the Orient with another of your splendid novels. With best wishes, Frances Marion. A fantastic association copy, with an additional inscription to Hogan on the front endpaper by Marion’s friend and fellow screenwriter Virginia Kellogg: To Pen, More than friend also a mentor to us! With your fiction guidance as well as the factual—Fondly Virginia Kellogg. Kellogg’s screenplay for Caged, a film experience of women in prison produced in 1950, was derived from Marion’s ideas and stole the thunder of her novel, which came out three years later.
During Marion’s research into conditions in men’s prisons for The Big House, she came to the conclusion that “[c]haracters in the subconscious mind of a writer are not different from prisoners; they are always seeking a way out.” She was particularly affected by the plight of female captives:
I already had visited the women’s cell block at San Quentin and later on, Tehachapi, when the women inmates were moved there. The memory of these varied types came back vividly and there were a few who had touched my heart: the old, whose children had long since forgotten them, and the young unwed girls whose babies were born in prison and taken away soon after birth. (quoted in Beauchamp, p. 362)
Though Marion began with the idea of bringing the plight of these inmates to the screen, she later recollected, “[t]he shocking conditions in most of these powder kegs made me decide to incorporate my impressions in a novel rather than a screen story, where truth and cold, hard facts are often deleted by the movie censors” (dust-jacket). Her work on the novel was leaked to a Los Angeles paper, where an unscrupulous producer seized upon the idea and, claiming it was his own, hired Virginia Kellogg to write what eventually became Caged, “already before the cameras by the time it [The Powder Keg] was published” (Beauchamp, p. 362).
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