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BOOKS AND LETTERS FROM THE LIBRARY OF ANTHONY POWELL
Lot 327

WAUGH (EVELYN)
Decline and Fall, FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE, AUTHOR'S PRESENTATION COPY, INSCRIBED "For Tony who rescued the author from worse than death, E.W." on front free endpaper, Chapman & Hall, September 1928

24 June 2015, 11:00 BST
London, Knightsbridge

Sold for £13,750 inc. premium

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WAUGH (EVELYN)

Decline and Fall, FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE, AUTHOR'S PRESENTATION COPY, INSCRIBED "For Tony who rescued the author from worse than death, E.W." on front free endpaper, 6 plates after the author, pencil annotations by Powell on pp.168-169 (noting the alterations to text made in subsequent editions, and equating characters in text to real life figures, i.e. Eddie Gathorne Hardy, Cecil Beaton), publisher's cloth, 8vo, Chapman & Hall, September 1928

Footnotes

"TO TONY, WHO RESCUED THE AUTHOR FROM WORSE THAN DEATH" — a fine presentation copy of Waugh's first published novel. The years in the period before Waugh was launched as an author ("worse than death") were probably "the unhappiest stretch of his life... he had not settled job or ambition..." (Michael Davie, The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, 1976, p.158). Duckworth, who had at Powell's instigation had published Waugh's Rossetti earlier in 1928, "refused Decline and Fall on the grounds of obscenity, and Chapman agreed to publish only after censorship. When it appeared in September 1928, however, its reviews were glorious" (ODNB).

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