Goodbye, Columbus.

ROTH, Philip.

Item Number: 2890

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959.

First edition of the author’s first book and winner of the National Book Award. Octavo, original cloth. Signed by Philip Roth on the title page. Light rubbing to the bottom cloth, fine in a fine dust jacket without the usual toning to the spine. Jacket design by Sanford Roth. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. A superior example.

"Goodbye Columbus, a Houghton Mifflin Literary Award, is Philip Roth’s first book, and an impressive one. There is blood here and vigor, love and hate, irony and compassion. Mr. Roth has written a perceptive, often witty and frequently moving piece of fiction." The novella is accompanied by five short stories that range in tone from the iconoclastic to the astonishingly tender that illuminate the subterranean conflicts between parents and children and friends and neighbors in the American Jewish diaspora. Saul Bellow wrote upon review of Goodbye, Columbus, "Unlike those of us who come howling into the world, blind and bare, Mr. Roth appears with nails, hair, teeth, speaking coherently. He is skilled, witty, energetic and performs like a virtuoso." It was the basis for the 1969 film starring Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw, directed by Larry Peerce. The screenplay, by Arnold Schulman, won the Writers Guild of America Award.