Description: Philip Atlee's debut novel, The Inheritors, is a scathing social critique and forgotten American classic that achieved a "lost book" status due to intense local controversy. Published in 1940, the novel provides an unflinching, thinly-veiled portrayal of the hedonistic lives of the "dollar aristocracy" in Fort Worth, Texas, the author's own social circle.
The story, written with a style drawing comparisons to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, or O'Hara, follows two aimless young men, George Jimble and Cavin Jarvis, as they navigate a world of privilege defined by excessive drinking, casual sex, and general dissipation. These so-called "inheritors" are the well-groomed, educated, yet morally bankrupt, offspring of wealthy cattle and oil tycoons, educated in a system that prizes profit over responsibility. They express a profound disdain for the superficiality of their country club set, engaging in petty grifts and even arson out of sheer boredom and a lack of purpose. The book's realistic and unflattering depiction of the town's elite caused a local scandal; copies were reportedly bought up en masse by outraged society members (including potentially the author's own mother) and the book was banned from the public library shelves. This suppression effectively forced the novel into obscurity, lending it the status of a lost, underground cult classic for decades. Considered well ahead of its time and long a mainstay on literary critic A.C. Greene's 'Fifty Best Books About Texas', The Inheritors is a powerful, brutal, and insightful exploration of inherited wealth and moral decay in early 20th-century America. It was later republished as a paperback under the title The Naked Year in 1954 and is seeing a modern resurgence in interest with an upcoming reprint from TCU Press.Brief description: James Young Phillips, pseudonym 'Philip Atlee', was a Fort Worth native whose first novel so scandalized the well-to-do citizens of his Country Club upbringing that it was banned from public library shelves. Following stints as a flight dispatcher, Marine, Broadway publicist, and screenwriter, he turned to writing mystery and espionage novels, ultimately selling millions of copies worldwide.
Review Quotes: THE INHERITORS. By Philip Atlee. 305 pp. New York: The Dial Press. $2.50. bracket. On this score Mr. Atlee's publishers reassure us by attesting that he was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1915, yet such reassurance was hardly necessary. Here, obviously, is no academic study of Country Club younger set members, but a portrayal by a writer whose familiarity with his subject is that of a very recent ex-member. If Fort Worth's fast younger set of 1935 had a corporate existence, no doubt they would sue Mr. Atlee for defamation, unmollified by his prefatory declaration that conditions described in the story are not typical of youth in the middle Thirties. While one might agree that similar conditions existed in many urban centers, some readers will, with excusable acerbity, deny that "the story could have been told anywhere in America, about any place that had a country club." Comparing "The Inheritors" with its congeners of the Scott Fitzgerald succession, one notes among the similarities an inclination to place the blame for the follies of youth on the fathers--neglectful fathers too occupied with pleasure or business to give proper attention to the guidance of their offspring. Paternal neglect, so often assumed to be a peculiarly American failing, is no doubt a universal error. One suspects that the prodigal son would have been handed a cold boiled potato had not his father sought to compound with a guilty conscience; and had Pericles not devoted all his time and thought to the public affairs of Athens and the construction of the Parthenon his sons would certainly not have turned out such a disreputable lot. Fort Worth's "Inheritors" are the grandsons of the oil operators and cattle barons of the late nineteenth century. The neglected sons of those lusty men of action spent their inheritances in luxurious living, giving their children little beyond the college education which the mores of our times demand of even the most neglectful well-to-do parents. At home there was no attempt to prepare the boys for the hard knocks of life, no inculcation of the copybook virtues, no implanting of the idea of social responsibility. Either they would inherit a fortune, in which case there would be no need to worry, since money can solve all problems, or they would be expected to replenish depleted family coffers by the most practical means short of highway robbery. When the Depression threw many of these young hedonists on their own resources they generally made a sad mess of affairs. George Bellamy Jimble 3d, who with his friend, Cavin Jarvis, started a small business venture, tells what happened to him and his circle. This tale of a social group "indoctrinated with the virus of dollar aristocracy" is far from edifying. The men are chiefly concerned with drink, gambling and seduction; the women are, for the most part, as unprincipled as the men. Business dishonesty is applauded if it can be managed with safety. To be sure there are some hilariously funny scenes; the characterizations are well done and the story moves along with the driving force of a virile style; but the cumulative effect on the reader of this highly sensational variety of social criticism is of having spent an evening in most uncongenial company. It is to be hoped that in his next book Mr. Atlee will use his gifts of humor and narrative skill to portray a more normal and saner circle than that of Messrs. Jimble and Jarvis.
--The New York Times Book Review, November 10, 1940.