Memoirs of A Public Baby

Faber & Faber, 1958 232 printed pages. Signed and with dedication in ink on front free endpaper. Leading edge of text block very slightly and marginally foxed. 14 x 20.5 cm. Original grey cloth with spine lettered in red. Tiny amount of marginal dust staining on corners and very top of spine. Complete with original unclipped and unrestored yellow jacket, with short tears at the top and bottom of the spine with minimal losses- likewise at the corners. Some slight general wear and handling marks. Overall a very presentable copy with an early author's signature. Philip O'Connor (1916-98), an incorrigible, flamboyant and self-absorbed British eccentric who turned a fulsomely frank account of his abject childhood and misspent youth into a literary sensation in 1958, Memoirs of a Public Baby.'' O'Connor supported himself largely by sponging off friends and his six wives, & wrote incessantly, mainly about himself. By his own account in ''Memoirs,'' which covered the first 25 years of his life, O'Connor was lucky to survive his childhood with a sense of humour, albeit a distinctly acerbic one. Leaving school at 17, O'Connor plunged into the bohemian life in the artistic quarter of London known as Fitzrovia turning out surrealistic poetry, but was beset by chronic alcoholism. Stephen Spender contributed an admiring introduction to ''Memoirs'' and another when the book was reissued by Norton in 1989. The book, hailed for its uncompromising honesty, was greeted in England with almost unremitting acclaim, which included an entire BBC broadcast devoted to its merits and lavish praise from Cyril Connolly and Philip Toynbee & drew praise from the disparate likes of Saul Bellow, Paul Bowles, Joseph Brodsky, William Burroughs, Arthur Miller and Dorothy Parker. In the Times's Sunday Book Review, John W. Aldrige, a professor of literature at New York University, likened O'Connor to Yeats, praised him for his ''sharply epigrammatic wittiness'' and hailed him for revealing himself as ''an unspeakable cad, scoundrel and snob -- in short a brutally honest man.'' Three autobiographical sequels followed, 'The Lower View' (1960), about bicycle visits to writers and artists, 'Living in Croesor' (1962), describing his sojourn in a Welsh village, and 'Vagrancy' (1963), a study of those on the bottom of British society.. Inscribed by Author(s). 1st Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Good.