The Headmaster: Frank L. Boyden, of Deerfield.

First Edition of The Headmaster; Inscribed by John McPhee

The Headmaster: Frank L. Boyden, of Deerfield.

MCPHEE, John.

Item Number: 1346

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.

First edition of the author’s second book, which profiles Headmaster Frank Boyden of Deerfield Academy. Octavo, original cloth. Inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “For Anthony Green with all best- John McPhee.” Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Illustrated with photographs. Dust jacket design by Lawrence Ratzkin.

Starting in 1902 at a country school that had an enrollment of fourteen, Frank Boyden built an academy that has long since taken its place on a level with Andover and Exeter. Boyden, who died in 1972, was the school’s headmaster for sixty-six years. John McPhee portrays a remarkable man "at the near end of a skein of magnanimous despots who...created enduring schools through their own individual energies, maintained them under their own absolute rule, and left them forever imprinted with their own personalities." More than simply a portrait of the Headmaster of Deerfield Academy, it is a revealing look at the nature of private school education in America. “The Headmaster is a record of a lifetime's striving to create perfection--a striving conducted with zest, vision, humor and an unbelievable capacity for work" (John McKey, The Boston Globe).

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