|
If you don't see what you want, please proceed to our Want List
and let us know what you're looking for.
Maugham, William Somerset. THE EXPLORER. New York: The Baker & Taylor Co., 1909. Original olive green cloth with white front cover panel.
First American (and first illustrated) Edition. This was the novelization of a play Maugham had written the previous year but which had then been rejected. Maugham inscribed one copy of THE EXPLORER by describing it as "his worst book"; he noted in a contemporary letter, "I have come to the conclusion it is very dull and stupid." This is a good-to-very good copy (volume a little askew, minor edge-wear, a few light cover spots, endpapers cracked). Toole Stott A11a.
This copy is inscribed and signed by Maugham on the title page, "for Karl" -- with his printed name lined through and replaced with his signature. Karl Graham Pfeiffer was an American who, as a 19-year-old college student in 1923, first met Maugham at a Washington hotel when the latter sent his companion Gerald Haxton in search of a "fourth" for a game of bridge -- and Haxton returned with Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer and Maugham corresponded frequently during the late 1930s, culminating in Pfeiffer's 1939 visit to Maugham's Villa Mauresque in the South of France; during the subsequent war, Maugham lived in the U.S. and visited Pfeiffer in South Carolina at least twice. After the war the relationship went downhill, when Pfeiffer decided he wanted to write a biography of Maugham. Maugham asked him not to, but in 1959 Pfeiffer did anyway (SOMERSET MAUGHAM: A CANDID PORTRAIT), and in the process wrote rather disparagingly of Maugham's writing. End of relationship.
If you don't see what you want, please proceed to our Want List
and let us know what you're looking for.
|
