The Right Stuff.

WOLFE, Tom.

Item Number: 2790

New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979.

First edition. Octavo, original cloth with titles to the spine in silver. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Signed by Tom Wolfe and additionally signed by pilot Chuck Yeager and by John Glenn, one of the Mercury Seven. A very sharp copy, 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). Listed by Modern Library as one of the top 100 nonfiction works of the twentieth century.