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The Centaur : A Novel by John Updike : 1st UK Edition : A Fine Copy in VG DW
The Centaur : A Novel by John Updike : 1st UK Edition : A Fine Copy in VG DW
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THE CENTAUR
By John Updike
Published by Andre Deutsch, London, 1963. First UK Edition. Hardback book with unclipped dust jacket. 302 pages.
Comes with a receipt showing this book being bought in 1991 for the sum of £75.00 (see images)
CONDITION
A very good first UK edition. The dust jacket remains unclipped in price and is in good condition with no tears. The jacket is now protected in a removable mylar sleeve to keep it in good condition. Boards and spine are good. Endpapers good. No names or writing. All pages clean throughout. Overall a very good first edition.
The Centaur is a novel by John Updike, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1963. It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Portions of the novel first appeared in Esquire and The New Yorker.
The story concerns George Caldwell, a school teacher, and his son Peter, outside of Alton (i.e., Reading), Pennsylvania. The novel explores the relationship between the depressive Caldwell and his anxious son. George has largely given up on life; what glory he knew, as a football player and soldier in World War I, has passed. He feels put upon by the school's principal, and he views his students as hapless and uninterested in anything he has to teach them. Peter, meanwhile, is a budding aesthete who idolizes Vermeer and dreams of becoming a painter in a big city, like New York. He has no friends his age, and regularly worries that his peers might detect his psoriasis, which stains his skin and flecks his clothes every season but summer. One thing George and Peter share is the desire to get out, to escape their hometown. This masculine desire for escape appears in Updike's famed "Rabbit" novels. Similarly, the novel's image of Peter's mother alone on an untended farm is one we later see in Updike's 1965 novel Of the Farm.
By John Updike
Published by Andre Deutsch, London, 1963. First UK Edition. Hardback book with unclipped dust jacket. 302 pages.
Comes with a receipt showing this book being bought in 1991 for the sum of £75.00 (see images)
CONDITION
A very good first UK edition. The dust jacket remains unclipped in price and is in good condition with no tears. The jacket is now protected in a removable mylar sleeve to keep it in good condition. Boards and spine are good. Endpapers good. No names or writing. All pages clean throughout. Overall a very good first edition.
The Centaur is a novel by John Updike, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1963. It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Portions of the novel first appeared in Esquire and The New Yorker.
The story concerns George Caldwell, a school teacher, and his son Peter, outside of Alton (i.e., Reading), Pennsylvania. The novel explores the relationship between the depressive Caldwell and his anxious son. George has largely given up on life; what glory he knew, as a football player and soldier in World War I, has passed. He feels put upon by the school's principal, and he views his students as hapless and uninterested in anything he has to teach them. Peter, meanwhile, is a budding aesthete who idolizes Vermeer and dreams of becoming a painter in a big city, like New York. He has no friends his age, and regularly worries that his peers might detect his psoriasis, which stains his skin and flecks his clothes every season but summer. One thing George and Peter share is the desire to get out, to escape their hometown. This masculine desire for escape appears in Updike's famed "Rabbit" novels. Similarly, the novel's image of Peter's mother alone on an untended farm is one we later see in Updike's 1965 novel Of the Farm.
