A Burnt-Out Case.

GREENE, Graham.

$4,000.00

Item Number: 102563

London: Heinemann, 1961.

First edition of this Greene novel set in a leproserie on the upper reaches of a tributary of the Congo River in Africa. Octavo, original cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the title page, “For Anthony Hobson from Graham Greene.” The recipient Anthony Hobson, auctioneer and book collector, was a director at Sotheby’s and friend of Greene’s. He successfully organized the sale of the Greene’s manuscripts at Sotheby’s in 1964. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Dust jacket design by Lacey Everett.

Greene dedicated A Burnt-Out Case to Docteur Michel Lechat, a medical doctor at a leper colony in Yonda in Africa (one of a number of such colonies Greene had visited in the Congo and the Cameroons, which had inspired his novel). In his dedication to Lechat, Greene writes: "Doctor Colin has borrowed from you his experience of leprosy and nothing else. Doctor Colin's leproserie is not your leproserie.... From the fathers of your Mission I have stolen the Superior's cheroots--that is all, and from your Bishop the boat that he was so generous as to lend me for a journey up the Ruki." In reference to the characters in the novel, Greene writes: "It would be a waste of time for anyone to try to identify Querry, the Ryckers, Parkinson, Father Thomas--they are formed from the floatsum of thirty years as a novelist." Commenting on his literary intentions in the work, Greene wrote that it was, "an attempt to give dramatic expression to various types of belief, half-belief, and non-belief, in the kind of setting, removed from world-politics and house-hold-preoccupations, where such differences are felt acutely and find expression." Drawing a comparison between a leper-colony doctor's work and that of a novelist, Greene adds: "A doctor is not immune from 'the long despair of doing nothing well", the same "cafard that hangs around a writer's life."