Up Front [FIFTH PRINTING] [VINTAGE 1945]

Mauldin, Bill

Published by Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1945

About this Item

Very good condition brown linen boards with black front cover illustration and black spine lettering. Profusely illustrated with Bill Mauldin black-and-white cartoon drawings. One cartoon on page 55 has been neatly removed/cut out of the page. All other pages are in fine unmarked condition and the spine/binding is tight and square (see photographs). ".Bill Mauldin, greatest cartoonist of this war.You'll be surprised to find that there are thirty-odd thousand words of text here. No one knew how well Bill Mauldin could write (except for his wonderful captions) until he set out to tell, in words as well as in pictures, what he's been seeing in this war. Sample any page or two of his prose - there's the same biting humor, the same truth smacking you between the eyes, as there is in his magnificent drawings. Text and pictures together make what we believe to be one of the finest books of the war, the kind to show people, in the years to come, what it was like in our time. At 23 Bill Mauldin is recognized as an artist of major stature, and his drawings of the war ought to live as long as the history books. He has been under fire in the slit trenches and the rain and the mud with our frontline soldiers, and he knows war for the dirty mess it is - a nightmare of terror, dirt, misery. He knows, as no one can who hasn't been there, that Willie and Joe, with their unshaven faces, their damp, soggy fatigue suits, their shoulders sagging under rain-soaked combat packs, are our fighting men, the guys who have been up front in France, or Italy or Burma, for a couple of straight months or years. Mauldin knows their gripes, their jokes, their opinions, their fears, and he records their talk with the most pungent accuracy. He has caught their life so vividly that it is no wonder he is their favorite. Maudlin's drawings are now syndicated in about a hundred American newspapers. But even his millions of admirerrs are going toe be startled by the quality of this first wide selection of his work. There is this terrific, inescapable power in his text and pictures; they reveal, as nothing else has so far, the wonderfully human truth about those dogfaces who are slugging it out, through this worst of all wars." - from the inner front and rear jacket flaps.

Seller Inventory # 008787

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Up Front [FIFTH PRINTING] [VINTAGE 1945]
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Company, New York
• Publication Date: 1945
• Language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Mauldin, Bill
• Printing: 5th Printing
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket