The Wild Palms.

FAULKNER, William.

$7,800.00

Item Number: 144096

London: Chatto & Windus, 1939.

First British edition of the Nobel Prize-winning author’s grandly inventive, heart-stopping classic novel. Octavo, original cloth. Signed by the author on the title page, “William Faulkner New York 3 March 1953.” Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Rare and desirable signed with no other inscribed British edition ever appearing at auction.

In this feverishly beautiful novel William Faulkner interweaves two narratives, each wholly absorbing in its own right, each subtly illuminating the other. In New Orleans in 1937, a man and a woman embark on a headlong flight into the wilderness of illicit passion, fleeing her husband and the temptations of respectability. In Mississippi ten years earlier, a convict sets forth across a flooded river, risking his own chance at freedom to rescue a pregnant woman. From these separate stories Faulkner composes a symphony of deliverance and damnation, survival and self-sacrifice, a novel in which elemental danger is juxtaposed with fatal injuries of the spirit. The Wild Palms is grandly inventive, heart-stopping in its prose, and suffused on every page with the physical presence of the country that Faulkner made his own.