Franklin Library leather edition of Irwin Shaw's "The Young Lions," Illustrated by Dennis Lyall, a Limited edition, one of the SIGNED 60 series, PERSONALLY SIGNED by IRWIN SHAW, signature protected by tissue paper, published in 1979. Bound in grey leather, the book has matching moire silk end leaves, sating book marker, hubbed spine, gold gilding on three edges----in near FINE condition. Irwin Shaw, who lived from 1913 – 1984, was an American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and short-story author whose written works have sold more than 14 million copies. He is best known for "The Young Lions" (1948), about the fate of three soldiers during World War II, which was made into a film starring Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift. Christian Diestl is at first a sympathetic Austrian drawn to Nazism by despair for his future but willing to sacrifice Jews if necessary; Noah Ackerman is an American Jew facing discrimination of the American kind; and Michael Whitacre is an American WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) who struggles with his lack of meaning arising from his lack of struggles. The three have very different wars: Diestl becomes less sympathetic as he willingly sacrifices more and more merely to survive; Ackerman finally overcomes the discrimination of his fellows in the army only to be nearly undone by the horror of the camps; Whitacre, still without meaning in his life, survives them both. In a 1953 interview, Shaw commented, "what I was trying to do in The Young Lions was to show the world at a certain point in its history, its good and evil, and as many people as I could crowd into the book struggling through that world, trying to find some reason for trying to stay alive in it." He described the character of the German soldier Christian: "I wanted to show how a man can start out decent, intelligent, well meaning, as so many people in Germany must have been, even in the greatest days of Nazism – and wind up bestialized, almost bereft of humanity, almost dead to the instincts of survival even, as the Germans finally were, by believing in one false thing, which spreads and spreads and finally corrupts them entirely." 728 pages. I offer Combined shipping.