World Enough and Time.

WARREN, Robert Penn.

Item Number: 142092

New York: Random House, 1950.

First edition of this classic novel; one of the big sleepers in 20th century American fiction and the “richest of [Warren’s] novels” (New York Herald Tribune). Octavo, original cloth. Signed by Robert Penn Warren with a full page inscription on the front free endpaper. Near fine in a very good dust jacket. Jacket design by Jules Gottlieb. A unique example.

In the admixture of wilderness and elegant society that was 1826 Kentucky, Jeremiah Beaumont, a brilliant, imaginative lawyer, stood trial for murdering his benefactor and father figure, the politician Colonel Cassius Fort. Now all the documents are in hand to reconstruct Beaumont's life story -- his crime, his trial, his ultimate sin and punishment -- and the historian-narrator of World Enough and Time sets about doing just that. He uncovers a burning idealist's search for purpose and his rabid rejection, like other great Promethean heroes of the American mythology, of conventional heroism. Based on the famous murder case known as the Kentucky Tragedy, World Enough and Time is, like its precursor All the King's Men, a fictional wonder that personifies history, philosophy, politics, and passion.