A Murder, A Mystery, and A Marriage.

TWAIN, Mark. [Samuel Clemens].

$40.00

Item Number: 128640

New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001.

Early printing of Twain’s entertaining tale, published for the first time in 2001. Octavo, original half cloth, illustrations by Peter de Seve. Foreword and Afterword by Roy Blount Jr. From the collection of William Safire, although not marked. William Safire was an important American author, columnist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter. He joined Nixon’s campaign for the 1960 Presidential race, and supported him again in 1968. After Nixon’s 1968 victory, Safire served as a speechwriter for him and Spiro Agnew. He authored several political columns in addition to his weekly column “On Language” in The New York Times Magazine from 1979 until the month of his death and authored two books on grammar and linguistics: The New Language of Politics (1968) and what Zimmer called Safire’s “magnum opus,” Safire’s Political Dictionary. Safire later served as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board from 1995 to 2004 and in 2006 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket illustration by Peter de Seve. Jacket design by Julie Mets. With a first edition of Justin Kaplan’s Born to Trouble: One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn [Washington: Library of Congress, 1985] laid in with the publisher’s press release.

No longer in Twain's possession at the time of his death in 1910, and embattled in the courts in the 1940s, A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage appeared in this 2001 edition for the first time It is a delightful rendition of life (and a disturbing death) in the mythical hamlet of Deer Lick, Missouri.