After Many a Summer
- Hardcover
- London: Chatto and Windus, 1939
London: Chatto and Windus, 1939. First UK edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Fair. 314pp. Octavo [19.5 cm] Brown cloth over boards with a gilt stamped title on the spine. Publisher's brown top stain. With darkened strips to the endpapers and toning to the pages, else very fresh. In the dust jacket, which is torn in half. The story of a Hollywood millionaire who fears his approaching death. Originally published in the UK, this novel was published later the same year in the United States under the title "After Many a Summer Dies the Swan."
From the dust jacket-
"Central to this extravaganza is the story, at once grotesque and painful, farcical and reflective, of an attempt to prolong the span of human life. But in terms of this rather nightmarish tale of the adventures of a rich man terrified of death, the book treats of the ultimate topics of all philosophy- bondage and liberation, reality and illusion, the problem of good, the nature of evil, and finally, of course, causality, the great empirical fact that God is not mocked, together with that other empirical fact that men are for ever trying to mock God, with results that are invariably disastrous.
From the dust jacket-
"Central to this extravaganza is the story, at once grotesque and painful, farcical and reflective, of an attempt to prolong the span of human life. But in terms of this rather nightmarish tale of the adventures of a rich man terrified of death, the book treats of the ultimate topics of all philosophy- bondage and liberation, reality and illusion, the problem of good, the nature of evil, and finally, of course, causality, the great empirical fact that God is not mocked, together with that other empirical fact that men are for ever trying to mock God, with results that are invariably disastrous.