BECKETT, Samuel. Murphy.

BECKETT, Samuel. Murphy.
New York: Grove Press, [1957]

8vo (202 x 130 mm). [iv], 282 pp. Signed on the limitation statement; stray spots. Gilt-lettered quarter brown cloth over flecked paper-covered boards, original clear acetate dustjacket, as issued; gilt a bit faded, lightly toned at extremities as usual, foot of spine barely bumped, dustjacket with loss at head and tail. Very good.

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION, limited issue. One of only 100 hand-numbered copies signed by Beckett, this being number 47. This specially bound edition was published simultaneously with the trade edition.

Beckett’s first major work, first published by Routledge in the United Kingdom in 1938, was originally met with a lukewarm critical response. In the early 1930s, Beckett struggled intensely to overcome the influence of his mentor, James Joyce; or, in his own words in a 1931 letter, “I vow I will get over J.J. ere I die. Yessir.” Murphy, in fact, represents a dual achievement: it at once heralds the arrival of Beckett’s distinctive authorial voice and aesthetic vision, while also being his final work indebted to the master.

In a rare impulse to justify his work, Beckett wrote to his literary agent at the time of the novel’s completion, “if the book is slightly obscure, it is so because it is a compression ... The wild & unreal dialogues ... are the comic expression of what elsewhere is expressed in elegy, namely if you like the hermeticism of the spirit” (Beckett to George Reavey, November 13, 1936). By the time of the work’s first publication in the Untied States, Beckett had risen to his status as a titan of modernist literature.

Scarce.

PROVENANCE: Ira Silverberg

REFERENCE: Federman & Fletcher 25.11

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