Mosby's Memoirs & Other Stories
The Viking Press, 1968. First Edition. Cloth & Boards. Near Fine / Near Fine in Plastic Cover. Item #5335
A lovely First Edition of Saul Bellow's first collection of stories. In blue and cream cloth & boards, there is the slightest of toning to the page edges; otherwise Fine. With a nice blue topstain on the upper page edges. The Near Fine dustjacket is complete with original price ($5.00) intact; there are some chipping and wear at places on the dustjacket edge; otherwise a Near Fine collectible edition.
The Los Angeles Times reviewed the book stating, “What Henry James did for the geographically disoriented, Bellow does for the culturally traumatized in the six stories gathered in this collection. Truly, Bellow is one of God’s spies.” Bellow was deemed the “novelist of the intellectuals” by literary critic Maxwell Geismar.
In “Bellow’s Logic,” published in The Massachusetts Review (1969), Shaun O’Connell reviewed “Mosby’s Memoirs and Other Stories” and wrote: “Saul Bellow portrays a world in which, though the real life is the life of the mind, those who live by this precept end up in pretty sad shape. They slouch under the weight of their awareness, still another burden, like their lumbering, aging bodies, their painful, unforgettable pasts, their unloving loved-ones. In Bellow’s books the truth makes no one free, but there is no help for it; his people are stuck with what they know…Bellow dramatizes this insight in these beautiful stories, portraying people who think themselves into the damnedest fixes, neither able to control life with their ideas nor protect themselves from life with their rationalizations. But, in Bellow’s hands, people are always real, always moving, because he allows them to confront what Henry James called ‘the terrible algebra of [their] own existence.’"
Price: $100.00 other currencies