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  • First Edition of William Faulkner's Unvanquished

    FAULKNER, WILLIAM.

    Unvanquished.

    New York: Random House 1938.

    First edition of this novel which tells the story of the Sartoris family, who first appeared in the novel Sartoris. Octavo, original cloth, illustrated by Edward Shenton. Near fine in a fine dust jacket. Housed in a custom slipcase. An exceptional example.

    Price: $1,400.00     Item Number: 140414

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  • First Edition of William Faulkner's These Thirteen

    FAULKNER, WILLIAM.

    These Thirteen (13).

    New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith 1931.

    First edition of Faulkner’s first collection of stories. Octavo, original cloth, pictorial endpapers, blue topstain. Fine in a near fine dust jacket with a touch of shelfwear. Jacket design by Arthur Hawkins. An exceptional example.

    Price: $1,200.00     Item Number: 140381

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  • "What threatens us today is fear": The original typed manuscript of Faulkner's important public address to his daughter Jill's graduating class at University High School in Oxford Mississippi; with autograph corrections and deletions in his hand

    FAULKNER, WILLIAM.

    Address to the Graduating Class of 1951 of University High School, Oxford, Mississippi.

    : .

    The original typed manuscript of Faulkner’s important public address to his daughter Jill’s graduating class at University High School in Oxford Mississippi with autograph corrections and deletions in his hand. Three pages, carbon typescript, the text contains 8 strikethroughs and 6 autograph corrections in Faulkner’s hand in ink. In this important public address, Faulkner clarifies for a young audience the terms for survival and optimism in the Cold War era, ideas which he first expressed publicly five months earlier in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. In the spring of 1951, Faulkner was in Paris, New York, and Lexington, Kentucky, where he covered the Kentucky Derby for Sports Illustrated. He had planned to return to Oxford and resume work on Requiem for a Nunhowever, “Jill had telephoned him in New York to say that the principal of the high school had asked if he would talk to her high-school class.  It sounded like some sort of informal talk, and he found it difficult to refuse Jill anything within reason. On arriving home, he found that it was the featured address at the commencement ceremonies for her graduating class. He would have to write another speech, for a formal event before more than a thousand people” (Blotner). In addressing the graduating seniors and their families, Faulkner begins with the threat of the atomic bomb and informs his audience that there are more sinister forces then even the bomb at work in the post-war world. As early as 1945, he had expressed in private letters his distaste for communism and the Soviet Union. He chose not to name these threats to individuality and personal freedom in his Nobel speech. Here, by contrast, he zeroes in on his target: “Our danger is the forces in the world today which are trying to use man’s fear to rob him of his individuality, his soul, trying to reduce him to an unthinking mass by fear and bribery—giving him free food which he has not earned, easy and valueless money which he has not worked for; — the economies or ideologies or political systems, communist, or socialist or democratic… whatever they wish to call themselves, who would reduce man to one obedient mass for their own aggrandizement and power, or because they themselves are baffled and afraid, afraid of, or incapable of, believing in man’s capacity for courage and endurance and sacrifice.” The typescript reads: “man’s capacity for courage and honor and compassion and sacrifice.” Toughening his stance and reinforcing his tempered pessimism, he scores through “honor and compassion,” replacing them with “endurance” in ink. After exhorting the students to retain their individuality, and thus change life on earth,  he ends by telling them: “In one generation all the Napoleons and Hitlers, Caesars and Mussolinis and Stalins and all the other tyrants who want power and aggrandizement, and the simple politicians and time-servers who themselves are merely baffled or ignorant or afraid, who have used, or are using, or hope to use, man’s fear and greed for man’s enslavement, will have vanished from the face of it.” As in Stockholm, Faulkner spoke softly and rapidly and many in the audience could not understand his words, despite the fact that a he was using a public-address system.  It was the largest graduation audience Oxford had ever seen and the applause was thunderous.  At four and a half minutes, it was also the shortest graduation address on record. In near fine condition. This major public address, often overshadowed by the Nobel Prize acceptance speech, shows William Faulkner as vigilant Cold Warrior, distinguished citizen of Oxford and proud parent of a graduating high school senior.

    Price: $17,500.00     Item Number: 135874

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  • "A Faulkner oddity with a most interesting genesis and publication history": Three original typed drafts of William Faulkner's short story Afternoon of a Cow. By Ernest V. Trueblood

    FAULKNER, WILLIAM.

    Afternoon of a Cow Original Typed Manuscript Drafts.

    : .

    Three original typed drafts of William Faulkner’s parodical short story “Afternoon of a Cow.  By Ernest V. Trueblood.” Two complete copies, each 17 leaves; bound with brass clasps in green folders with the third copy lacking the first leaf; with 49 strikethroughs in Faulkner’s hand throughout most excising a single word. When Faulkner returned to Oxford at the end of World War I, he was writing poetry, much of it under the influence of the French Symbolists.  In the summer of 1919, he borrowed Mallarmé’s title, “L’Après-midi d’un Faune,” for a 40-line poem of frustrated love. The poem appeared in The New Republicon 16 August was a revised version appeared in The Mississippian at Ole Miss in the fall.  Early the next year he was to publish in Oxford a poem inviting comparison with François Villon, “Une Ballade des Femmes Perdues.” As Joseph Blotner says diplomatically, “Such poetry unsurprisingly provoked various responses.”  Parodies began to appear in The Mississippian.  One was “Une Ballade d’une Vache Perdue,” signed by “Lordgreyson.” The poem described the heifer Betsey, lost and wandering far from home. “It was an amusing tour de force, which Faulkner may have had in mind seventeen years later, ‘one afternoon,’ he recalled, ‘when I felt rotten with a terrible hangover.’  He was then working unhappily at Twentieth Century-Fox” (Blotner). “The story generates interest because it uses Faulkner himself as a character, much in the manner of a post-modernist writer such as Paul Auster. The story reports on a frightened cow that has fallen into a ditch during a fire. The character Faulkner, along with Oliver, a black butler, and Ernest V. Trueblood, the first-person narrator of the tale, rush to rescue the cow, but they are at first unsuccessful. In its fear and distress, the cow empties its bladder and bowels upon Faulkner, shattering the dignity of the scene. The story ends with Faulkner stripping in the door of the stable and washing. Latter, wrapped in a horse blanket, he and his friends drink to the cow” (Fargnoli & Golay). Faulkner was very fond of this story and thought it particularly funny. On 25 June 1937, he read the story to his guests after dinner in Los Angeles, telling them it was the work of a talented boy named Ernest V. Trueblood. The only person who seemed to appreciate the story was his house guest and French translator, Maurice Coindreau. The Frenchman was in Los Angeles to discuss his translation of The Sound and the Fury, which became one of the most influential and celebrated literary translations of the century. Faulkner gave Coindreau a carbon typescript of the translation as a souvenir. In 1939, Faulkner was to appropriate elements of the story for the mock chivalric romantic treatment of Ike Snopes’s love for Jack Houston’s cow in The Hamlet. During the war, Faulkner approved Coindreau’s translation of the story, published in the June/July number of Fontaine in Algiers. It first appeared in English in Furiosoin 1947 and was anthologized by Dwight Macdonald in a collection of parodies in 1950. In very good condition.

    Price: $15,000.00     Item Number: 139485

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  • Original typed manuscript of an untitled short story by William Faulkner's father, Murry Cuthbert Falkner

    FALKNER, MURRY CUTHBERT. [WILLIAM FAULKNER].

    Murry Cuthbert Falkner Typed Short Story Manuscript.

    : .

    Original typed manuscript of an untitled short story by William Faulkner’s father, Murry Cuthbert Falkner [William changed the spelling of his surname from Falkner to Faulkner early in his writing career], preserved among the family’s papers and only recently discovered. Quarto, carbon typescript, 13 leaves. While it is well known that William Faulkner and his father did not get along and did not share a passion for literature, Murry Faulkner was a reader of sorts (Zane Grey was his favorite author) and he did attempt to write fiction from time to time.  He also claimed never to have read any of his son’s novels. The present example of Murry’s work can be dated by the stationary to the 1920’s when he served as Secretary of the University of Mississippi. According to Judith L. Sensibar, who interviewed two of Murry’s secretaries in 1989, one of them, Martha Ida Wiseman, read a melodramatic romance Murry had written in purple ink in an Ole Miss ledger.  Wiseman did not think much of Murry as a writer, but did remark that he considered himself a better writer than his son. The present story, which concerns a backwoods trapper who pursues romance in the big city, reflects Murry’s interest in pulp fiction and dime novels. Murry was not William Faulkner’s only scribbling antecedent. His great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner (1825–1889), model for the fictional John Sartoris, was the author of The White Rose of Memphis (1880), a melodrama which remained in print for thirty years and sold 160,000 copies. In very good condition.

    Price: $2,500.00     Item Number: 132861

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  • Signed Limited Edition of William Faulkner's The Wild Palms

    FAULKNER, WILLIAM.

    The Wild Palms.

    New York: Random House 1939.

    Signed limited edition, number 14 of only 250 examples. In near fine condition, without the usual fading accustomed to this title. Housed in a custom half morocco slipcase. Uncommon in this condition.

    Price: $2,750.00     Item Number: 142141

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  • First edition of William Faulkner's The Town; from the library of Cormac McCarthy with his ownership signature

    FAULKNER, WILLIAM. [CORMAC MCCARTHY].

    The Town: A Novel of the Snopes Family.

    New York: Random House 1957.

    First edition, first printing of the second novel in Faulkner’s celebrated Snopes trilogy with line 8 on page 327 repeated as line 10. Octavo, original publisher’s cloth. From the library of Cormac McCarthy with his ownership signature to the front free endpaper. McCarthy has been widely praised as not only a disciple of Faulkner, but his literary heir. Both authors’ biblically influenced prose formed the basis of a large body of tragically intertwined, powerful narratives filled with a nostalgic yearning for an earlier, ancestral, rural America. In many ways, McCarthy picked up where Faulkner left off, further exploring and elaborating on a number of core themes including the concept of sin (including its consequences, transference, and ritualistic attempts to purify it), justification of (often savage and sacrificial) violence, and disillusionment with the moralist ideology of modern civilization. McCarthy’s writing style, particularly in his earlier work, owed much to Faulkner – in its dense prose, use of dialect, vivid imagery and descriptions of the American landscape, and fluid ambiguity of time and place. Published only three years after William Faulkner’s death and edited by Albert Erskine, who worked with Faulkner at Random House, McCarthy’s debut novel, The Orchard Keeper was awarded the 1966 William Faulkner Foundation Award and contains perhaps his most overt use of Faulknerian literary devices and mannerisms. Faulkner’s influence on McCarthy’s themes and style are also apparent to a notable degree in his fourth novel, Suttree (reminiscent of The Sound and the Fury) as well as his popular novels All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian, The Crossing, and The Road, where his descriptions of southern Appalachia evoke Faulkner’s fictional Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha. Near fine in a very good first issue dust jacket with the “5/57” date on lower front flap. Jacket design by Push Pin Studios. Author photograph by Phyllis Cerf. Housed in a custom half morocco and chemise slipcase. An exceptional association linking two of the greatest American novelists.

    Price: $8,800.00     Item Number: 143641

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  • First British Edition of The Wild Palms; Signed by William Faulkner

    FAULKNER, WILLIAM.

    The Wild Palms.

    London: Chatto & Windus 1939.

    First British edition of the Nobel Prize-winning author’s grandly inventive, heart-stopping classic novel. Octavo, original cloth. Signed by the author on the title page, “William Faulkner New York 3 March 1953.” Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Rare and desirable signed with no other inscribed British edition ever appearing at auction.

    Price: $7,800.00     Item Number: 144096

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  • "The past is never dead. It's not even past": First Edition of Requiem for a Nun; Inscribed by William Faulkner to Editor John Bott and with an original drawing

    FAULKNER, WILLIAM.

    Requiem for a Nun.

    London: Chatto & Windus 1953.

    First British edition of the sequel to Faulkner’s Sanctuary. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper in the year of publication on the title page and with an original drawing by Faulkner on the front free endpaper, “For John Bott William Faulkner New York 3 Mar 1953.” The recipient, John Bott was the City Editor of the New York Post who wore leg braces his whole life due to polio. Bott’s friend had just brought him the book from London. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Paul Hogarth. A unique example with a wonderful association and with a rare original drawing from the Nobel Prize-winning writer.

    Price: $12,500.00     Item Number: 144084

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  • First Edition of William Faukner's Soldiers' Pay; In the Original Dust jacket

    FAULKNER, WILLIAM.

    Soldiers’ Pay.

    New York: Boni & Liveright 1926.

    First edition of Faulkner’s first book in the rare first state dust jacket with An American Tragedy as the first of five titles listed on the rear jacket panel. Octavo, original cloth. Bookplate, near fine in a very good dust jacket with some toning to the spine and some chipping to the extremities. Housed in a custom clamshell box. Rare and desirable.

    Price: $18,500.00     Item Number: 81010

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