The Story of My Early Life: A Roving Commission.

CHURCHILL, Winston S.

$6,000.00

Item Number: 145060

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1945.

Later printing of Churchill’s acclaimed autobiography, recounting the first 25 years of his life. Octavo, original publisher’s cloth, illustrated with 7 plates, one folding map. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “To E.A. Allen from Winston S. Churchill Christmas 1946.” In very good condition. Housed in a custom velvet-lined half morocco clamshell box. Rare and desirable signed and inscribed.

My Early Life covers the first 25 years of Churchill's life, to the beginning of his parliamentary career. Included are accounts of his childhood; his active service in Cuba, the North West Frontier, and Omdurman; and his exploits during the Boer War, detailing his famous escape from the Boers as a prisoner of war. In this autobiography "Churchill records his experiences in words which will live as long as any 20th-century author is read… My Early Life was one of the two Churchill works excerpted by the Nobel Library - for Sir Winston's 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature was won not for his war memoirs but the totality of his work. This book presents Churchill at his dazzling best as chronicler and memoirist" (Langworth, 130).