A Handsome Man.

CHEEVER, Susan.

$200.00

Item Number: 142364

New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981.

First edition of this work by the award-winning author. Octavo, original half cloth. Presentation copy, warmly inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “April 30 New York For Burrows with love Susan.” The recipient, American litigator Kenneth David Burrows married American novelist Erica Jong in 1989. Jong remains best known for her 1973 novel Fear of Flying which became famously controversial for its portrayal of female sexuality and figured prominently in the development of second-wave feminism. Written in the first person and narrated by its protagonist, 29-year-old American poet Isadora Wing, Fear of Flying was written in the throes of the Sexual Revolution of the 1970s and encapsulated the movement’s redefinition of female sexuality. In interviews, Jong stated: “At the time I wrote Fear of Flying, there was not a book that said women are romantic, women are intellectual, women are sexual—and brought all those things together… What [Isadora is] looking for is how to be a whole human being, a body and a mind, and that is what women were newly aware they needed in 1973.” The novel remains a feminist classic and has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. From the library of Erica Jong and Ken Burrows. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket.

A Handsome Man relays the story of publicist Hannah Bart who travels to Ireland with her older lover, Sam Noble, to meet his estranged son, Travis, and finds herself in competition with the young man for his father's love. "It is Cheever's ability to dive suddenly from the surface to the deeper places of the soul that makes her novel work" (The Philadelphia Inquirer),