Oscar Hammerstein II, Richard Rodgers

First printing of the hit musical in book form, the first collaboration of the great American theater duo Rodgers and Hammerstein.

• Richard Rodgers (American).
• Oscar Hammerstein II (American).
• New York: Random House, [1943].
• [10], 146 pages.
• Photographic frontispiece and four full-page plates of the original Broadway production.
• Original price-clipped three-color printed pictorial brown dust jacket.
• Bound in original full cream cloth, image of boots stamped in blue and red on front board, and spines stamped in blue and red.

This book was published with photographs of the original cast the same year as the debut of the play, which would become one of the most beloved musicals in the history of Broadway with songs like "Oh What a Beautiful Morning" and "People Will Say We're in Love." Based on the 1931 novel Green Grow The Lilacs by Native American writer Lynn Riggs, the musical adaptation won a special Pulitzer Prize for the arts in 1944. The bright dust jacket design is based on the advertising posters for the original Broadway production. Published in the midst of wartime paper rationing.

"Oklahoma! has long been regarded as so monumentally important to the history of the American stage musical that in some surveys it is treated as the very linchpin of the genre." – Elizabeth L. Wollman

Elizabeth L. Wollman, A Critical Companion to the American Stage Musical.

Katherine K. Preston and Nicholas Everett, The Cambridge Companion to the Musical.