The Beautiful Years

New York: E. P. Dutton & Company. Very Good+. 1929. 1st American Edition; 1st Printing. Hardcover. This book is in Very Good+ condition and is lacking a dust jacket. The book and its contents are in generally clean, bright condition. The spine ends, spine joints and corners of the book covers have some light bumping, rubbing and beginning fraying. The spine of the book has toning / fading. The text pages are clean and bright. There is a previous owner's inked name on the front pastedown page. "Henry William Williamson (1 December 1895 – 13 August 1977) was an English army officer, naturalist, farmer and ruralist writer known for his natural history and social history novels. He won the Hawthornden Prize for literature in 1928 with his book Tarka the Otter." "The Beautiful Years, the first volume of The Flax of Dream, was HW’s first book. In the hierarchy of The Flax of Dream it represents ‘Childhood’. The writing of this first book did not come easily and there were many false starts. Demobilised on 9 September 1919, but very traumatised by his experiences of the First World War, HW was living at home surrounded by his stern over-critical father (himself exhausted by his war duties as a special constable on top of his job as a bank clerk) and his rather cloying, sentimental, seemingly ineffectual and fearful mother, plus his two sisters between whom and with whom there were constant quarrels." .