The Winter of Our Discontent.

STEINBECK, John .

$12,500.00

Item Number: 138829

New York: The Viking Press, 1961.

First edition, presentation edition of Steinbeck’s final novel, one of only 500 examples with only a few known inscribed examples, which along with The Grapes of Wrath are considered his masterpieces. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “Hello Dennis — We live, but I wonder whether we learn anything John Steinbeck.” The reply in a second hand reads, “As I told John — We don’t. Dennis Wesley.” The recipient, Dennis Wesley was an illustrator, who illustrated Steinbeck’s classic The Red Pony over twenty years earlier. He was also known for illustrating fifteen children’s books about horses that he created in collaboration with writer Marguerite Henry. He illustrated over 150 books in his lifetime, including Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty and also wrote and illustrated a few books of his own, among which are Flip, Flip and the Cows, Flip and the Morning, and Tumble. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Elmer Hader. Lettering by Jeanyee Wong. Photograph by William Ward Beecher. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box by Asprey. An exceptional association.

In awarding John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel committee stated that with The Winter of Our Discontent, he had “resumed his position as an independent expounder of the truth, with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American.” Ethan Allen Hawley, the protagonist of Steinbeck’s last novel, works as a clerk in a grocery store that his family once owned. With Ethan no longer a member of Long Island’s aristocratic class, his wife is restless, and his teenage children are hungry for the tantalizing material comforts he cannot provide. Then one day, in a moment of moral crisis, Ethan decides to take a holiday from his own scrupulous standards. Set in Steinbeck’s contemporary 1960 America, the novel explores the tenuous line between private and public honesty, and today ranks alongside his most acclaimed works of penetrating insight into the American condition.