BRIDESHEAD REVISITED

Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1945. Book Club, First Edition Thus. . Hardcover. Near Fine/Good Plus to Very Good. Waugh's signature work -- the story of the rich and damned Marchmain family as told by Captain Charles Ryder, revisiting the family's home, Brideshead, during the war years. It is a story of the stress that religious faith can put on different personalities within a family as it confronts love and divorce. After publication in England in 1945, the first edition published in the U.S. was Little Brown's Bookclub edition, also in 1945. The Little Brown trade edition was not issued until 1946, resulting in the unusual occurence of the bookclub edition being the true first U.S. edition. This copy, in red cloth-covered boards with black lettering, shows only lighlty-bumped upper corner and spine ends and slightly soiled text edges, o/w clean and unmarked, tight and square. The dustjacket, with a brown spine and front panel and a cream back panel containing "critical comments" from five earlier Waugh novels taken from an Edmund Wilson "New Yorker" article, shows wear at the corners and spine ends with a one-inch tear and chipping at the top of the spine, chipping at the upper corners and tiny tears and creasing along the bottom edge. The dj's back panel is somewhat soiled. That said, the dj is 98% whole with no missing design or printed matter. Overall, this is a collectable copy of the true First American edition of what many consider Waugh's master work.