Description

“A BOOK IS THE WRITER’S SECRET LIFE, THE DARK TWIN OF A MAN”: EXCEEDINGLY SCARCE FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE OF MOSQUITOES, FAULKNER’S SECOND NOVEL, IN ORIGINAL DUST JACKET

FAULKNER, William. Mosquitoes. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927. Octavo, original blue cloth, blue-and-white patterned endpapers, original dust jacket. Housed in a custom clamshell box. 

First edition, scarce first issue, of Faulkner’s second novel—“a poetic turning point”—in rarely found original dust jacket. A beautiful copy.

In Mosquitoes, Faulkner’s second novel, there is “a tremendous flowering of themes that would soon preoccupy him.” Set in New Orleans and drawing on “the bohemian/artistic community he had come to know there,” the novel was published on April 30, 1927 (Parini, 97). To scholar Kenneth Hepburn, Mosquitoes stands as “a poetic turning point.” In this important early work, Faulkner explores artistic strategies that are “necessarily prior to the comfortable use of the Yoknapatawpha material and central to the development of the open-ended poetic out of which were generated Faulkner’s major works” (20th Century Literature 17:1,19). “As Hemingway’s Paris friends had played the game of identifying the models for characters in The Sun Also Rises, so Faulkner’s New Orleans friends would be able to do the same with Mosquitoes” (Blotner, 182-3). First edition, first issue: without “September, 1931” on copyright page. First-issue dust jacket with Boni & Liveright on spine end, $2.50 price, printed red on green with mosquito motif: issued together with dust jacket printed red, blue and black with card players and yacht design, no priority established. Petersen A4.1a-1b. Brodsky 45. Small bookseller label to rear pastedown.

Book fine; only very mild toning to spine of colorful, bright dust jacket. A highly desirable fine copy, virtually never seen in this condition.