Description

“A MAJOR EVENT IN THEATRE”: VERY RARE FIRST STATE OF T.S. ELIOT’S COCKTAIL PARTY, INSCRIBED BY ELIOT TO HIS FRIEND AND GERMAN TRANSLATOR ERNST ROBERT CURTIUS

ELIOT, T.S. The Cocktail Party. London: Faber and Faber, (1950). Octavo, original green cloth, original dust jacket.

First edition, first state (one of only “a few hundred at most”), inscribed to his friend and German translator, noted literary scholar and philologist Ernst Robert Curtius: “To Professor E. R. Curtius, from T.S. Eliot.”Based upon Euripides’ Alcestis, Eliot’s comedy premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in August 1949 and opened in New York the following January, featuring Alec Guinness in his Broadway debut, reprising his role as the Unidentified Guest. Followed by a London premiere the same year, The Cocktail Party won the 1950 Tony Award for Best Play and was hailed as “a major event in theater? No recent play combines so much polish with so much wit” (Time).First state, with the misprint “here” for “her” on page 29, line 1, later corrected in the press. Gallup A55a. Sackton A55a. Ernst Robert Curtius was Eliot’s friend and translator, an internationally respected literary scholar and philologist whose 1948 work European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (translated into English in 1953) remains a standard text. On the occasion of his friend’s death in 1956, Eliot wrote: “Certainly, in common with other English and French writers, I owe him a great debt, and perhaps I owe him more than does any other: for it was he who first brought my work to the notice of the German public? I have my own personal debt of gratitude to acknowledge to Curtius, for translating, and introducing, The Waste Land. Curtius was also, I think, the first critic in Germany to recognize the importance of James Joyce? Only a critic of scholarship, discrimination and intellect could perform the services that Curtius has performed” (Freundesgabe für ERC, 1956).

Mild embrowning to pages 52-53, where a newspaper clipping was laid in. Interior clean, cloth fresh and fine. Dust jacket with just a bit of creasing along edges and lightly toned spine, near-fine. An excellent inscribed copy with distinguished association.