What happens when a mix of lovers get stuck together on a coast-to-coast train? Mainly hilarity. There is every kind of couple imaginable. One serviceman and his bride-to-be are trying desperately to get married but can't find a clergyman to perform the rites. They don't know that right in their midst is a preacher disguised as a man of the world so he and his wife can enjoy a carefree vacation. Then there is a drunk mourning his separation from the wife who just happens to be on the same train. There is even a confirmed bachelor who discovers that a confirmed spinster is his long-lost love from years ago...

Perhaps the most commercially successful Hollywood novel of the 1920s, Rupert Hughes' Souls for Sale is a direct response to contemporaneous charges of the film industry's moral laxities and predilections toward vice. Remember "Mem" Steddon, the pious and steadfast daughter of a religious firebrand who preaches about the sins of Hollywood, is forced to migrate to the west coast after discovering that she's become pregnant out of wedlock. On her journey, Mem runs into the inhabitants of a movie colony and soon befriends many of these delightful (if somewhat peculiar) "film folk...