Pudd’nhead Wilson: A Tale.

TWAIN, Mark.

$350.00

Item Number: 128012

London: Chatto & Windus, 1894.

First English edition of Twain’s classic tale of two mischievous twins, published several days before the first American edition. BAL 3441. Octavo, original publisher’s pictorial cloth with gilt titles to the spine, tissue-guarded frontispiece portrait of Twain by James Mapes Dodge and six illustration by Louis Loeb. From the library of William Safire with his bookplate to the pastedown. William Safire was an important American author, columnist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter. He joined Nixon’s campaign for the 1960 Presidential race, and supported him again in 1968. After Nixon’s 1968 victory, Safire served as a speechwriter for him and Spiro Agnew. He authored several political columns in addition to his weekly column “On Language” in The New York Times Magazine from 1979 until the month of his death and authored two books on grammar and linguistics: The New Language of Politics (1968) and what Zimmer called Safire’s “magnum opus,” Safire’s Political Dictionary. Safire later served as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board from 1995 to 2004 and in 2006 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush. In very good condition.

“A major part of Twain’s Mississippi writings. It resembles Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in being set before the Civil War in a small Missouri town modeled on Hannibal. However, it has a much more somber tone. While it contains humor, it deals frankly with small-town prejudice, slavery, miscegenation, lost birthright, degenerate aristocratic values and distorted parental love” (Rasmussen, 372). “Includes a series of brilliant epigrams, each the headpiece of a chapter, which are distillations of Twain’s wit and wisdom” (Benet, 795).