Description

EXCEPTIONAL PRESENTATION/ASSOCIATION COPY OF GADDIS’ IMPORTANT FIRST BOOK, THE RECOGNITIONS, INSCRIBED BY WILLIAM GADDIS TO AUTHOR WILLIAM T. VOLLMAN

GADDIS, William. The Recognitions. New York: Harcourt, Brace, (1955). Octavo, original black cloth, original dust jacket. Housed in a custom cloth slipcase and chemise.

First edition of Gaddis’ important first novel, inscribed to fellow National Book Award-winning author William T. Vollman: “for William T. Vollman—William Gaddis.”

“The Recognitions is an astonishing first novel… the subsequent course of post-war American fiction has confirmed Gaddis’s achievement: his erudite and sophisticated satire on the mechanisation of human emotion and commercialisation of religious and artistic experience provides the model for many later (and better-known) writers” (Parker, 319-20). The recipient of this copy, William T. Vollman, is a critically acclaimed writer who received the National Book Award in 2005 for his novel, Europe Central. “There are at least three writers now living and working who can be ranked among the eight or ten greatest novelists America has produced? The three are William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and the comparatively unknown William T. Vollman” (Washington Post).

Book fine, fragile dust jacket about-fine with only lightest rubbing to extremities.