Vonnegut Kurt Edited Introduction Dan (2 results)

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. 1st Edition. KURT VONNEGUT: LETTERS, edited and with an Introduction by Dan Wakefield, hardcover with unclipped dust jacket, stated first edition and first printing, illustrated with photos, 2012. BOOK CONDITION: near fine. The text block is in fine condition, with no tears, dogears, or marks. No bookplate or signature of a prior owner. Not a library book, but there is a red remainder mark on the bottom edge. The black boards are in very good condition (top of spine is noticeably bumped). The dust jacket is in very good condition (light crinkling along top edge, bookstore price tag on front cover). 9 ½ x 6 ½, 436 pages, 28 ounces XX [From the dust jacket flaps] Letters as splendid in their own way as those of Keats (Publishers Weekly, starred review) XX This extraordinary collection of personal correspondence displays all the hallmarks of Kurt Vonnegut's fiction. Written over a sixty-year period, these letters, the vast majority of them never before published, are funny, moving, and full of the same uncanny wisdom that has endeared this author to readers worldwide. Included in this comprehensive volume: the letter a twenty-two-year-old Vonnegut wrote home immediately upon being freed from a German POW camp, recounting the ghastly firebombing of Dresden that would be the subject of his masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five; wry dispatches from Vonnegut's years as a struggling writer slowly finding an audience and then dealing with sudden international fame in middle age; righteously angry letters of protest to local school boards that tried to ban his work; intimate remembrances penned to high school classmates, fellow veterans, friends, and family; and letters of commiseration and encouragement to such contemporaries as Gail Godwin, Günter Grass, and Bernard Malamud. Vonnegut's unmediated observations on science, art, and commerce prove to be just as inventive as any found in his novels, from a crackpot scheme for manufacturing "atomic" bow ties to a tongue-in-cheek proposal that publishers be allowed to trade authors like baseball players. (Knopf, for example, might give John Updike's contract to Simon and Schuster, and receive Joan Didion's contract in return.) Taken together, these letters add considerable depth to our understanding of this one-of-a- kind literary icon, in both his public and private lives. Each letter brims with the mordant humor and open-hearted humanism upon which he built his legend. And virtually every page contains a quotable nugget that will make its way into the permanent Vonnegut lexicon. XX ON A JOB HE HAD AS A YOUNG MAN: Hell is running an elevator throughout eternity in a building with only six floors. TO A RELATIVE WHO CALLS HIM A GREAT LITERARY FIGURE (I am an American fad, of a slightly higher order than the hula hoop. ON BORIS, HIS CHESS-PLAYING ROBOT (Really, he is one smart, mean son of a bitch.) TO NORMAN MAILER (I am cuter than you are.) Sometimes biting and ironical, sometimes achingly sweet, and always alive with the unique point of view that made him the true cultural heir to Mark Twain, these letters comprise the autobiography Kurt Vonnegut never wrote.

Hardcover. Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Fine. 1st Edition. First Edition stated with complete number line intact. Clean, tight hardcover with unmarked interior and text. The dustjacket remains unclipped ($35.00) and presents like new. NOT ex-lib. A clean, solid copy in jacket. Indexed. xxvi, 436pp.