Author SIGNED Pulitzer Prize-Winner The Late George Apley

Description: The Late George ApleyAuthor SIGNED Pulitzer Prize-Winner 1938 First Edition Hardcover in Dust Jacket The Late George Apley: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir by John P. Marquand. Little Brown & Company: Boston, Massachusetts (1937). SIGNED by the author! Quite scarce thus. Hardcover in dust jacket, 354 pages. First edition, fifth printing. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for 1938. A satire of upper-class Boston. The title character is a Harvard-educated blueblood living on Beacon Hill in downtown. The New Yorker called the book the "best-wrought fictional monument to the nation's Protestant elite.” The narrative begins in the early 1930s. Wealthy Bostonian John Apley engages a somewhat pompous literary man to produce a truthful biography of his recently deceased father, George. This writer, named Horatio Willing, specializes in flowery, sanitized tributes to local luminaries, and he is disturbed by the young man's request for frankness, especially since George Apley was his good friend, but he reluctantly agrees. Willing moves chronologically through Apley's 66 years, using letters from his late subject's personal papers to trace his life from the Gilded Age to the Great Depression. He frequently interjects his own comments, declaring his admiration for Apley the public-spirited citizen and bemoaning the disclosure of "scandalous" information about the man and his family. Willing, a comic character in his own right, longs for the old days in Boston, when subjects such as love affairs, alcoholism, mental illness and crime were kept out of the papers if they involved prominent people, and when respectability was considered more important than personal happiness. The image of George Apley that emerges in the course of the novel is alternately hilarious and poignant, but ultimately sympathetic. Apley is revealed as a man who was deeply conflicted about his status among Boston's elite, sometimes feeling imprisoned in his privileged world, but his feeble attempts at rebellion are crushed in a vise of snobbery, tradition, and privilege. Subtly revealed is a life in which success and accomplishment mask disappointment and regret, a life of extreme and enviable privilege that is shown to be nonetheless an imperfect life. Book very good condition, previous owner’s name, Boston book store seal, minor wear. Dust jacket good, price clipped, chipped and top and bottom of spine, edgeworn with short tears and chips. Winning bidder pays S&H.

Price: 700 USD

Location: Espanola, New Mexico

End Time: 2024-02-13T03:21:27.000Z

Shipping Cost: 5 USD