Tobacco Road
CALDWELL, Erskine
Publisher: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd
Location: London, England
Date: 1936
Binding: Octavo, full-bound red cloth with title to front and spine.
Edition: FIRST EDITION
Printing: 2nd Printing
Description:
First Edition, Second Printing of Erskine Caldwell's classic, Tobacco Road. Presenting in its well-preserved original Dust Jacket. A very nice example.
Written in a tiny room in "a condemned New York City brownstone," Caldwell's provocative novel about white sharecroppers continues a "long tradition of Southern writing," yet joins the work of Thomas Wolfe and Faulkner in offering a "damning dissection" of rural life. After he submitted it to Scribner's famed editor Maxwell Perkins in 1931, Caldwell's third novel caused the firm to become "embroiled in an acrimonious debate about whether to publish Tobacco Road," and when it was finally released only a "small printing of 1500 copies rolled off the press in early 1932" (Miller, 128-37). After a Broadway stage adaptation premiered in 1933, "Hollywood also bought the book, but Caldwell described Zanuck's 1941 movie version as 'one of the most conspicuous failures in cinematic history' because of its falsified happy ending" (New York Times). Faulkner considered Caldwell "one of America's five greatest novelists, and as late as 1960 he was under consideration for the Nobel Prize" (Oakes, American Writers, 69). He remains "one of the most innovative American writers, whose comic vision of the grotesque absurdity of his characters' antics was carefully balanced by his insistence on the inequity and deprivation of their lives" (ANB).
Condition:
Binding tight with mild slant. Original full-bound cloth boards present clean and unmarked with bright original color. A bit of very light shelf wear and rubbing to corners with small bumps to front fore-edge and bottom. Heavy fading to about one-quarter inch of head of spine, much more mild to bottom. Text blocks clean and unmarked. Internally Fine. Dust Jacket presents well with clean, bright panels and original color well-retained but mildly faded. Toning to spine with a few light scratches. Heavy wear to corners with some loss. Partially closed and open tears to bottom and top of hinges with chipping to head and foot of spine with some loss. About one-inch closed tear laterally across spine. Near full separation of front hinge. A couple tape repairs to verso. Original Price of 3'6 net. A very nice example.
A Classic:
A classic work considered by many to be amongst the best, including The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow, All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren, American Pastoral by Philip Roth, An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, Animal Farm by George Orwell, Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume, The Assistant by Bernard Malamud, At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien, Atonement by Ian McEwan, Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood, The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, Call It Sleep by Henry Roth, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell, The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West, Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather, A Death in the Family by James Agee, The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen, Deliverance by James Dickey, Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone, Falconer by John Cheever, The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles, The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin, Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Others include titles such as, A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene, Herzog by Saul Bellow, Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul, I, Claudius by Robert Graves, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Light in August by William Faulkner, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, Loving by Henry Green, Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead, Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie, Money by Martin Amis, The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, Naked Lunch by William Burroughs, Native Son by Richard Wright, Neuromancer by William Gibson, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) by George Orwell, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey.
Even further, those recognize as the best of the best include The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski, Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, A Passage to India by E.M. Forster, Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion, Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth, Possession by A.S. Byatt, The Power and the Glory by Graham Green, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark, Rabbit, Run by John Updike, Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow, The Recognitions by William Gaddis, Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth, The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, The Sportswriter by Richard Ford, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré, The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls and Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, Ubik by Philip K. Dick, Under the Net by Iris Murdoch, Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, White Noise by Don DeLillo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.