The Moon is Down

STEINBECK, John

Publisher: The Viking Press

Location: New York, NY

Date: 1942

Binding: Octavo, full-bound cloth with title to front and spine.

Edition: FIRST EDITION

Printing: 1st Printing

Description:

First Edition, First Printing of John Steinbeck's classic, The Moon is Down. Presenting in it's Original First Issue Dust Jacket and containing the requisite First Impression error to page 112, line 11. A very nice example.

n 1941 Steinbeck met “with officials of the Foreign Information Service, a newly formed unit of what would soon become the Office of Strategic Services, to discuss the future of American counterpropaganda efforts. The Moon Is Down, begun later the same month, had its origins in Steinbeck’s long-standing desire to contribute to these efforts… Steinbeck submitted a first finished draft of The Moon Is Down, originally written as a play (called ‘The New Order’) and set in a mid-sized town in the United States, to agency officials; they turned it down, concerned that the prospect of an occupied America might lower morale. Early in December Steinbeck began revising the work, shifting the setting to a generic northern Europe and recasting the play as a novel; he sent his revised draft to Pascal Covici, his editor at Viking, later in December. The Moon Is Down [as a novel] appeared in book form in March 1942. A stage version opened on Broadway on April 9, 1942, and was published by Dramatists Play Service in New York later in the same year” (Library of America).

Condition:

Binding tight and square. Original full-bound blue boards present very well, clean and unmarked but for some mild age-toning to edges and hinges. Very mild wear to edges and head and foot of spine. Corners about clean. Text blocks bright with only a couple very faint spots. Internally clean, bright an unmarked. Dust Jacket presents well. Panels lightly faded and tanned. Hinges, crease and head and foot of spine show heavy wear with light chipping to former and heavy loss to latter, more so to head. A few mostly closed tears to head of spine with single to top rear. Flaps tanned and age-toned at edges, but clean with Original Price of $2.00. Requisite First Impression error to page 112 with period between "talk" and "this" at line 11. A very nice example.

A Classic:

As one of the more coveted novels, its often included amongst the most celebrated books, such as 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.