Property Of was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1977. The unnamed narrator is a young woman living in a deteriorating neighborhood called “the Avenue” — a fictional landscape that combines elements of New York’s Lower East Side and Hoffman’s own working-class background. She becomes the girlfriend of McKay, the leader of the Orphans gang, and the novel follows her through the world of street violence, heroin addiction, and the peculiar codes of loyalty that bind gang members to each other.
Hoffman was twenty-five — a graduate of Stanford’s creative writing program (where she studied with Albert Guerard) — and the novel shows a young writer of enormous talent not yet sure of her direction. The prose is denser and more self-consciously literary than her later work: influenced by García Márquez and the Latin American magical realists, it transforms the gritty streets into something hallucinatory.
The novel was well-reviewed but not widely read — it belongs to the literary-debut category of “admired by writers, unknown to the public.” But it established Hoffman’s essential method: taking marginal, damaged lives and revealing their internal beauty through prose that refuses to patronize or sentimentalize.
Collecting Property Of
First edition (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1977): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition with jacket, fine/fine: $80–$200
- Without jacket, very good: $20–$50