The Tin Drum.

"The Tin Drum Will Become One Of The Enduring Literary Works Of The Twentieth Century": First Edition Of The Tin Drum; Signed by gunter grass

The Tin Drum.

GRASS, Gunter.

Item Number: 2031

New York: Pantheon, 1962.

First American edition of the author’s first novel. Octavo, original red cloth. Signed by Gunter Grass on the half-title page. Fine in an excellent dust jacket that shows light wear. Translated by Ralph Manheim. A very nice example.

"When Günter Grass published "The Tin Drum" in 1959 it was as if German literature had been granted a new beginning after decades of linguistic and moral destruction. Within the pages of this, his first novel, Grass recreated the lost world from which his creativity sprang, Danzig, his home town, as he remembered it from the years of his infancy before the catastrophe of war. Here he comes to grips with the enormous task of reviewing contemporary history by recalling the disavowed and the forgotten: the victims, losers and lies that people wanted to forget because they had once believed in them. At the same time the novel breaks the bounds of realism by having as its protagonist and narrator an infernal intelligence in the body of a three-year-old, a monster who overpowers the fellow human beings he approaches with the help of a toy drum. The unforgettable Oskar Matzerath is an intellectual whose critical approach is childishness, a one-man carnival, dadaism in action in everyday German provincial life just when this small world becomes involved in the insanity of the great world surrounding it. It is not too audacious to assume that "The Tin Drum" will become one of the enduring literary works of the 20th century" (The Swedish Academy).

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