The Way Some People Live. Stories. (INSCRIBED)

Random House, New York, 1943. Book. Good. Hardcover. Inscribed by Author(s). 1st Edition. First edition - never reprinted. This copy inscribed by the author on the half-title and dated 1980. 8vo. 256pp. Red cloth, lettered, blocked and ornately bordered in blue at the spine, and with the publisher's imprint blue-stamped to the base of the upper board. Top edge dust soiled, and with just a trace of toning to the leaf margins. The cloth a little marked and rubbed in places, with a little bruising and a hint of wear to the backstrip ends. Family names of former owner (not the recipient of Cheever's inscription) inked to the front pastedown, and almost entirely obscured by the wrapper flap, and a small Chicago dealer plate to the base of the front free endpaper. An almost very good copy in non-price-clipped ($2.00) dust wrapper, lightly toned at the rear panel, and with some edgewear, creasing, and several small fractions of edge-loss, and one slightly smaller area of triangular loss from the base of the rear panel. Some tenderness to the rear panel - rear flap fold. The author's most uncommon first book [of which 2,750 copies were printed], containing thirty stories which represent most of his output in his twenties. None of these stories were subsequently included in the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection 'The Stories of John Cheever' (1979), and the vast majority - in fact probably none of them - were never reprinted or collected. Cheever deemed these early stories to be essentially juvenile efforts so he objected to them being reprinted and was generally reluctant to sign copies..