Franklin Library leather edition of William Styron's "Sophie's Choice," a Limited edition, Illustrated by Alan Reingold, one of the FIRST EDITION SOCIETY series, published in 1999.  Bound in light brown leather, the book has matching brown French moire silk end leaves, hubbed spine, acid-free paper, a satin book marker, Symth-sewn binding, gold gilding on three edges---in near FINE condition. William Styron, who lived from 1925--2006, was born in Newport News, Virginia. "Sophie's Choice" concerns the relationships among three people sharing a boarding-house in BROOKYLN, NEW YORK: Stingo, a young aspiring writer from the South; Jewish scientist Nathan Landau; and his lover Sophie, a Polish-Catholic survivor of the German Nazi concentration camps, whom Nathan befriends. Stingo has been fired from his low-level reader's job at the publisher McGraw-Hill and has moved into a cheap boarding house in Brooklyn, where he hopes to devote some months to his writing. While he is working on his novel, he is drawn into the lives of the lovers Nathan Landau and Sophie Zawistowska, fellow boarders at the house, who are involved in an intense and difficult relationship. The beautiful Sophie is Polish and Catholic, and a survivor of the Holocaust and Nazi concentration camps while Nathan is a Jewish-American, and, purportedly, a genius. Although Nathan claims to be a Harvard graduate and a cellular biologist with a pharmaceutical company, he is a liar! Almost no one—including Sophie and Stingo—knows that Nathan has paranoid schizophrenia and is abusing stimulants. He sometimes behaves quite normally and generously, but there are times when he becomes frighteningly jealous, violent, abusive, and delusional. As the story progresses, Sophie tells Stingo of her past. She describes her violently anti-Semitic father, a law professor in KRAKOW, POLAND; her unwillingness to help him spread his ideas; her arrest by the Nazis; and particularly, her brief stint as a stenographer-typist in the home of RUDOLF HOSS, the commander of AUSCHWITZ, where she was interned. She specifically relates her attempts to seduce Höss in an effort to persuade him that her blond, blue-eyed, German-speaking son should be allowed to leave the camp and enter the Lebensborn program, in which he would be raised as a German child. She failed in this attempt and never learned of her son's fate. Eventually, Nathan's delusions lead him to believe that Stingo is having an affair with Sophie, and he threatens to kill them both. As Sophie and Stingo attempt to flee New York, Sophie reveals her deepest, darkest secret: on the night that she arrived at Auschwitz, a camp doctor made her choose which of her two children would die immediately by gassing and which would continue to live, albeit in the camp. Of her two children, Sophie chose to sacrifice her eight-year-old daughter, Eva, in a decision that has left her in mourning and filled with a guilt that Sophie cannot overcome. By now alcoholic and deeply depressed, Sophie is willing to self-destruct with Nathan, who has already tried to persuade her to commit suicide with him. Despite Stingo proposing marriage and a shared night that relieves Stingo of his virginity and fulfills many of his sexual fantasies, Sophie disappears, leaving only a note in which she says that she must return to Nathan. Upon arriving back in Brooklyn, Stingo is devastated to discover that Sophie and Nathan have committed suicide.  624 pages. I offer Combined shipping.