Memoirs of Hecate County

London: W. H. Allen, 1951 First UK edition, first printing. Publisher’s yellow cloth, titles in blue to spine; original blue dust jacket designed by Peter Rudland, lettered in white and yellow. Book with a hint of toning to pages, else fine; near fine unclipped dust jacket with minor wear to spine ends and top edge of front panel, and a touch of rubbing to front panel. Overall, a beautiful copy. Memoirs of Hecate County is a collection of thematically linked short stories and a novella, all of which feature an unnamed narrator. The short stories are: “The Man Who Shot Snapping Turtles,” “Ellen Terhune,” “Glimpses of Wilbur Flick,” “The Milhollands and their Damned Souls,” and “Mr. and Mrs. Blackburn at Home.” The novella, “The Princess with the Golden Hair,” tells of the narrator’s obsessive love for two women, a Ukrainian waitress named Anna Lenihan and the seductive and chronically injured Imogen Loomis. The novella’s descriptions of sex caused the book to be banned in the United States for more than a decade. The book’s stories take place in a fictional suburb, Hecate County, named after the Greek goddess associated with sorcery and the underworld. Wilson wrote that the stories, “are all about different kinds of people, but they all have…an odor of damnation.” He later claimed that Memoirs of Hecate County was his favorite book that he had written.. First Edition. Hard Cover. Fine/Dust Jacket Included.