Antic Hay.
“Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?”: First Edition of Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay; Inscribed by Him
Antic Hay.
HUXLEY, Aldous.
$2,500.00
Item Number: 119728
London: Chatto & Windus, 1923.
First edition of this classic novel. Octavo, original cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “For James Murphy, thirty years later, Aldous Huxley, 1954.” Fine in a very good dust jacket with light rubbing and wear. Uncommon signed and inscribed.
London life just after World War I, devoid of values and moving headlong into chaos at breakneck speed - Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay, like Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, portrays a world of lost souls madly pursuing both pleasure and meaning. Fake artists, third-rate poets, pompous critics, pseudo-scientists, con-men, bewildered romantics, cock-eyed futurists - all inhabit this world spinning out of control, as wildly comic as it is disturbingly accurate. In a style that ranges from the lyrical to the absurd, and with characters whose identities shift and change as often as their names and appearances, Huxley has here invented a novel that bristles with life and energy, what the New York Times called "a delirium of sense enjoyment!"
