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8vo., [xviii], 305pp., illustrated with photographs by the author (the photograph facing page xviii, previoiusly unpublished, was selected by specially for the first edition), silk ribbon marker, marbled endpapers, all edges blocked in gilt, bound in quality full blue leather, covers blocked with ornate gilt designs, spine gilt decorated in compartments with raised bands and gilt lettering. A very fine bright clean copy. This LIMITED FIRST EDITION of A CLOAK OF LIGHT, is the true first edition of the book and precedes the trade edition, has been Privately Printed, and personally SIGNED by Wright Morris exclusively for members of The Signed First Edition Society. A total of 201 various classic First Editions by various authors were issued by the Franklin Library from 1983 until they ceased publishing in 2000. These books are highly collectible and are no longer available directly from the publisher. Wright Marion Morris (1910 1998) was an American novelist, photographer, and essayist. He is known for his portrayals of the people and artifacts of the Great Plains in words and pictures, as well as for experimenting with narrative forms. Following Will's Boy and Solo, this new volume of Morris' autobiography begins with the writer now poised on the brink of his career: college in California; marriage to a nameless coed (referred to only as "my wife"); WPA-level poverty; a move eastward to Cape Cod; and then the first photo-texts (The Inhabitants, The Home Place) that launched his professional-writing life. From the subsequent decades, Morris gives the greatest emphasis to his peripatetic, solitary wander-lusts--especially car-trips to Mexico, a locale that fills him with affection, then fascination and doubt. There are brief appearances by Robert Frost, Saul Bellow, Loren Eiseley, and Granville Hicks. And the domestic details of his later life do eventually emerge, somewhat obliquely: his odd, if not quite loveless, marriage; hints of infidelity on both sides (with vaguely lesbian innuendos); a final break at age 50; and a new beginning with a young art-dealer named Jo. With literary people, he is amiable but inconstant, a man who makes alliances uneasily and rarely, an essential loner. And Morris' style here--contrapuntal, unrhapsodic, sometimes even tight-lipped--adds to this sense of dislocation, of half-darkened views. Again, as in his previous autobiographical writings, Morris' feel for the conjunction of a specific time-and-place is on ample display--with personal, impressionistic illumination of the settings in his fiction (excerpts of which are interspersed throughout). Seller Inventory # 3765
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