The Lost Childhood and Other Essays.

GREENE, Graham.

$6,200.00

Item Number: 23055

London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1951.

First edition of this collection of essays by Graham Greene, two of its four parts, Personal Prologue and Personal Postscript, comprise seven invaluable pieces of autobiography. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author to fellow writer Norman Douglas on the front free endpaper, “Dear Norman This with my love. Thank you so much for the nostalgic picture postcard. Catherine and I both miss you a great deal and our drinks at the Victoria. We hope to come and find you sitting there in June and I will bring with me your Chinese snuff box! Love Graham.” With Norman Douglas’s ownership stamp on the front pastedown. Fine in a near fine dust jacket with a few small closed tears. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box made by the Harcourt Bindery. A fine association linking these two great novelists and travel writers of the twentieth century.

Norman Douglas is best known for his novel South Wind. However his travel books also combine erudition, insight, and some fine prose, which Greene drew upon for both his novels and travel books. These works include Siren Land (1911), Fountains in the Sand, described as 'rambles amongst the oases of Tunisia' (1912), Old Calabria (1915), Together (Austria) (1923) and Alone (Italy) (1921). In Michael Shelden’s biography of Greene The Man Within he paints a vivid account of Greene’s stay at Villa Rosaio in Anacapri, high above the Bay of Naples. It is, as Shelden points out, a difficult place to find and clearly an ideal retreat for a well known author like Greene. It was here that Greene struck up a close friendship with the author Norman Douglas, During the 1940s and 50s Greene and Douglas would often meet up and share dinners together and the two become close friends.