The Town.

FAULKNER, William.

Item Number: 89974

New York: Random House, 1957.

Signed limited first edition, number 154 of 450 copies. Octavo, original cloth. Signed by William Faulkner. Fine in the original acetate.

The second novel in Faulkner s celebrated Snopes trilogy which began with The Hamlet (1940) and ended with The Mansion (1959) emerges as a study in contrast: while there are "lots of narrative eddies, many of them swirling with good humor," passages such as Eula s suicide are "wrenching, and one understands why the author told Jean Stein that he had been reduced to tears while writing it. He was saying good-bye to his fantasies" (Parini, 394-96). While the book received many negative reviews, "reviewers in the main missed the grandeur of the scheme, the size of the enterprise, the attempt to write the epic not only of Yoknapatawpha but of the South [Faulkner] had not completely forsaken the adventurousness of his earlier work" (Karl, 959). Brodsky 382. Petersen A47.1a.