The Stonemason: A Play In Five Acts.

MCCARTHY, Cormac.

Item Number: 135333

Hopewell, NJ: The Ecco Press, 1994.

First edition of this expansively imagined drama about four generations of an American family. Octavo, original half cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the half-title page, “For Sean Deveux Merry Christmas From your friend Cormac McCarthy.” Additionally signed twice by jacket designer Chip Kidd, once on the front panel and again on the rear panel. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Chip Kidd.

The setting is Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1970s. The Telfairs are stonemasons and have been for generations. Ben Telfair has given up his education to apprentice himself to his grandfather, Papaw, a man who knows that "true masonry is not held together by cement but...by the warp of the world." Out of the love that binds these two men and the gulf that separates them from the Telfairs who have forsaken—or dishonored—the family trade, Cormac McCarthy has crafted a drama that bears all the hallmarks of his great fiction: precise observation of the physical world; language that has the bite of common speech and the force of Biblical prose; and a breathtaking command of the art of storytelling.