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F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925....
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Description
Scarce inscribed copy of Fitzgerald's masterpiece in a superior dust jacket
F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925.8vo. Publisher's green cloth, blind-lettered on upper cover, spine gilt-lettered. Original pictorial dust jacket; custom quarter morocco slipcase.
FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING, IN THE FIRST STATE DUST JACKET. PRESENTATION COPY, INSCRIBED BY FITZGERALD on the front free endpaper: "For D. L. Shelton / from his Sincerely / F Scott Fitzgerald / Feb 1927."
First printing, with "chatter" for "echolalia" on p. 60, "northern" for "southern" on p. 119, "sick in tired" for "sickantired" on p. 205, and "Union Street station" for "Union Station" on p. 211. In a first state dust jacket, with a lowercase "j" in "Jay Gatsby" on the rear panel hand-corrected in ink.
Fitzgerald's editor, Maxwell Perkins, and his friend and author Ring Lardner, both considered The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald's most perfectly realized work of art. Set on the North Shore of Long Island and Manhattan, and inspired by the extravagant social scene Fitzgerald observed during his eighteen-month residence in Great Neck over 1922-24, The Great Gatsby tells the tragic story of the American Dream gone awry as seen through the eyes of a midwestern narrator. The novel went through several failed starts prior to 1924, but it was not until he and Zelda had escaped the New York social scene to the Riviera in May 1924, that he seriously set himself to work on what would become his masterpiece. Although the finished work was admired by virtually all the eminent literary figures of his day, sales did not meet his expectations and only barely paid off his advance from Scribner's. In 1925--the year Dreiser published An American Tragedy, Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer and Hemingway's In Our Time--Fitzgerald made an impressive leap from his deeply flawed early novels to his first masterpiece (Meyers, p. 122).
Condition: Cloth very fine and bright. Slightest toning to endpapers and pastedowns. Dust jacket with very minor wear with small chips or creasing to ends of spine panel and extremities; a few tiny nicks or creases at flap folds; a few tiny closed tears at edges; very minor rubbing and soiling. Overall a brilliant copy in a fine unsophisticated dust jacket.
References: Bruccoli A11.1.a; Connolly, The Modern Movement 48.
Provenance: D. L. Shelton (presentation inscription); Lofland & Russell, Los Angeles (bookseller's label on rear pastedown); George R. Minkoff Rare Books, Great Barrington, MA; acquired from Seven Gables Bookshop, New York in 1972. From the William A. Strutz Library.
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Auction Info
2024 June 27 Important English and American Literature: The William A. Strutz Library, Part I, Rare Books Signature® Auction #6295 (go to Auction Home page)
Auction Dates
June, 2024
27th
Thursday
Bids + Registered Phone Bidders: 4
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