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FIRST EDITION. FIRST PRINTING. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929. Hardcover. No Jacket. Book Condition: Very Good-. No Jacket First Printing with the Scribner seal on the copyright page, and no mention of subsequent printings. The lower case 'g' in "greek" on page 308, line 26, and the missing 't' in "stationed" on page 506, line 23. Owner’s embossed seal on the fly leaf”. Pages slightly yellowed. Some shelf wear to extremities a few small tiers along spine upper end. Front hinge starting. A few very faint stains to the boards. A All items are guaranteed authentic. References: FPAA Vol. 1:Thomas Wolfe, Merle Johnson p. 549.
TO THE READER
This is a first book, and in it the author has written of experience which is now far and lost, but which was once part of the fabric of his life. If any reader, therefore, should say that the book is “autobiographical” the writer has no answer for him: it seems to him that all serious work in fiction is autobiographical — that, for instance, a more autobiographical work than “Gulliver’s Travels” cannot easily be imagined.
This note, however, is addressed principally to those persons whom the writer may have known in the period covered by these pages. To these persons, he would say what he believes they understand already: that this book was written in innocence and nakedness of spirit, and that the writer’s main concern was to give fulness, life, and intensity to the actions and people in the book he was creating. Now that it is to be published, he would insist that this book is a fiction, and that he meditated no man’s portrait here....
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