The Right Stuff.

WOLFE, Tom.

Item Number: 142331

New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979.

First edition of Wolfe’s classic work. Octavo, original cloth. Boldly signed by Tom Wolfe on the half-title page and additionally signed by pilots Chuck Yeager and inscribed by John Glenn. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Kiyoshi Kanai. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box made by the Harcourt Bindery. A very sharp example, rare signed by Wolfe, Yeager and Glenn.

Tom Wolfe began The Right Stuff at a time when it was unfashionable to contemplate American heroism. Nixon had left the White House in disgrace, the nation was reeling from the catastrophe of Vietnam, and in 1979--the year the book appeared--Americans were being held hostage by Iranian militants. Yet it was exactly the anachronistic courage of his subjects that captivated Wolfe. In his foreword, he notes that as late as 1970, almost one in four career Navy pilots died in accidents. "The Right Stuff," he explains, "became a story of why men were willing--willing?--delighted!--to take on such odds in this, an era literary people had long since characterized as the age of the anti-hero." "One of the most romantic and thrilling books ever written about men who put themselves in peril." (The Boston Globe). Basis for the acclaimed 1983 film written and directed by Philip Kaufman, starring Sam Shepard and Ed Harris. Listed by Modern Library as one of the top 100 nonfiction works of the twentieth century.