Paths of Glory.

COBB, Humphrey .

Item Number: 141426

New York: The Viking Press, 1935.

First edition of the author’s first and only book, the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s classic film, starring Kirk Douglas. Octavo, original cloth. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket with light shelfwear.

Humphrey Cobb volunteered to serve in a Canadian regiment in 1916 well before the United States entered World War I. Paths of Glory is his powerful first and only novel, about French soldiers wrongly court-martialed for cowardice. Its title derives from the Thomas Gray poem, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” In 1957, the novel was adapted to film, with a screenplay by Calder Willingham, crime novelist Jim Thompson and director Stanley Kubrick, starring Kirk Douglas. Martin Scorsese praised the classic war movie’s early influence on his own work, calling it a film that “was so honest it was shocking.” In 1992, the film was deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.