THE BLACK BOOK

New York: E. P. Dutton, & Co., Inc, 1960. First American Edition. Cloth. Fine/Near Fine. 8vo, black cloth with gold lettering on spine, Mylar-protected lettered dust jacket (unclipped), [1-6], 7-250 pages. Lawrence Durrell (1912 - 1990) was an expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer. Born in India to colonial parents, he was sent to England at the age of eleven for his education. His first book was published in 1935, when he was 23. In March,1935, he and his wife, and his mother and younger siblings, moved to the island of Corfu. Durrell spent many years afterward living around the world, to include Paris, France--associating closely with Henry Miller and Anais Nin; then Alexandria, Egypt and Rhodes; Cordoba, Spain, and Belgrade; and elsewhere.... During the late 1930's, Faber and Faber offered to publish Durrell's THE BLACK BOOK in an expurgated edition, but on the advice of author Henry Miller, Durrell declined. It was then published by Obelisk Press in Paris along with Henry Miller's, Max and the White Phagocytes and Anaïs Nin's, Winter of Artifice. Although THE BLACK BOOK was published in 1938, Durrell had written the novel over a 16-month period from September 1935 until December 1936. The novel shows several surrealist influences in part related to the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition, about which Henry Miller forwarded Durrell materials from Herbert Read. The initial publication had to be in Paris because THE BLACK BOOK's explicit sexual content prohibited publication in England. It was published in the US in 1960, but not published in Great Britain by Faber & Faber until 1973, following the successful courtroom defense of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. Durrell's most famous work is probably The Alexandria Quartet, a tetralogy published between 1957 and 1960. SUPERIOR CONDITION internally and externally (with slight rubbing to the extremities of the dust jacket).