EVERYMAN [First American edition]

Philip Roth

ISBN 10: 061873516X / ISBN 13: 9780618735167

Published by Houghton Mifflin, New York, 2006

About this Item

First impression of the first American edition with full number-string sequence including the no. "1": 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1. ***Near fine with a black cloth spine over black paper-covered boards with gilt titles to the spine. Boards clean and unmarked. Head and tail of spine slightly creased. Lower corners also slightly creased. Internally near fine, with pale grey front and rear endpapers. There is an Everyman Remainders sticker to the rear pastedown. Pages crisp and white. Spine tight. ***In a near fine colour printed dustwrapper, which retains the original publisher's price of $24.00. Extremities of dustwrapper just very slightly rubbed, with a very small crease at the bottom edge of the front panel. Spine and front and rear panels of dustwrapper bright. ***182 pages plus a note about the author at the end of the book. 198 x 132 mm. ***'"Everyman" is a novel by Philip Roth, published by Houghton Mifflin in May 2006. It won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2007] It is Roth's third novel to receive the prize. The book begins at the funeral of its protagonist. The remainder of the book, which ends with his death, looks mournfully back on episodes from his life, including his childhood. The book traces the protagonist's feelings as he gets increasingly old and sick, and his reflections of his own past, which has included his share of misdeeds and mistakes, as he ponders his impending death. [Wiki] ***'Philip Roth's new novel is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret and stoicism. The best-selling author of "The Plot Against America" now turns his attention from "one family's harrowing encounter with history" (New York Times) to one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality.' (Quote taken from the front flap of the dustwrapper). ***First impression of the first American edition, in its original dustwrapper in bright near fine condition. Uncommon in the UK. ***For all our books, postage is charged at cost, allowing for packaging: any shipping rates indicated on ABE are an average only: we will reduce the P & P charge where appropriate - please contact us for postal rates for heavier books and sets etc.

Seller Inventory # 7680

Bibliographic Details

• Title: EVERYMAN [First American edition]
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, New York
• Publication Date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 061873516X
• ISBN 13: 9780618735167
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First American Edtion
• Printing: First Impression
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literature
  • First Editions

About this title

Synopsis

Philip Roth's new novel is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The best-selling author of The Plot Against America now turns his attention from "one family's harrowing encounter with history" (New York Times) to one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality.

The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age, when he is rended by observing the deterioration of his contemporaries and stalked by his own physical woes.

A successful commercial artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons from a first marriage who despise him and a daughter from a second marriage who adores him. He is the beloved brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy, and he is the lonely ex-husband of three very different women with whom he's made a mess of marriage. In the end he is a man who has become what he does not want to be.

The terrain of this powerful novel -- Roth's twenty-seventh book and the fifth to be published in the twenty-first century -- is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.

Everyman takes its title from an anonymous fifteenth-century allegorical play, a classic of early English drama, whose theme is the summoning of the living to death.

About the Author

In 1997, Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times.

In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004.”

Recently Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award for “a body of work…of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship” and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose “scale of achievement over a sustained career…places him or her in the highest rank of American literature.”

Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The last of eight volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013.