A Talent for Loving

A Talent for Loving, published in 1961, was the fourth novel by Richard Condon and one of the books that inspired a brief cult for his strenuously off-beat works. A subtitle does not appear on the cover of its first edition but is shown on an inner page, and the entire title is sometimes given as A Talent for Loving; or The Great Cowboy Race. Although Condon's three earlier works all had occasional elements of sardonic, or even exceptionally dark humor in them, this novel is forthrightly humorous throughout and could be called a modern version of the tall tale, or exaggerated story-telling, so typical of the 19-century American Old West.

Title

The title, as is the case in five of Condon's first six books, is derived from the first line of a typical bit of Condonian doggerel that supposedly comes from a fictitious Keener's Manual mentioned in many of his earlier novels:

The riches I bring you

Crowding and shoving,

Are the envy of princes:

A talent for loving.

The verse is found as an epigraph on a blank page five pages after the title page and four pages before the beginning of the text.