Memoirs of Hadrian.

YOURCENAR, Marguerite.

Item Number: 111934

New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1955.

First edition of the author’s masterpiece. Octavo, original cloth. Boldly signed by Marguerite Yourcenar on the half-title page. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Translated from the French by Grace Frick. Rare and desirable signed, the first we have handled and none appearing auction in the last 65 years.

Both an exploration of character and a reflection on the meaning of history, Memoirs of Hadrian has received international acclaim since its first publication. In it, Marguerite Yourcenar reimagines the Emperor Hadrian's arduous boyhood, his triumphs and reversals, and finally, as emperor, his gradual reordering of a war-torn world, writing with the imaginative insight of a great writer of the twentieth century while crafting a prose style as elegant and precise as those of the Latin stylists of Hadrian's own era.