Roderick Hudson

The Riverside Press, Houghton Mifflin, 1892. hardcover. Very Good. 0x0x0. 1892 Houghton Mifflin (Boston, Massachusetts), association copy (children's author/illustrator Maurice Sendak), green buckram cloth hardcover, no dust jacket, gilt lettering to front cover and spine, 347 pp. Very slight soiling, rubbing and edgewear to covers. A couple of pencil bibliographic notations to the blank front and rear endpapers, possibly by former owner, author/illustrator Maurice Sendak (1928-2012). Otherwise, apart from very slight age toning, a very good copy - clean, bright and unmarked. No Sendak bookplate, but a certificate of provenance is laid in from the auction house which establishes that the book was from the personal library of Sendak, and was sold on behalf of the famed Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia. Sendak was known to be an inveterate reader of nineteenth-century authors, including Henry James. His library included a large number of volumes by and about James, including this early reprint of James' first serious attempt at a full-length novel. ~SP08~ [2.0P] Roderick Hudson is an early full-length novel by American-British author Henry James. Originally published between January and December 1875 as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly, it is a bildungsroman that traces the development of the title character, a sculptor. Although the book shows some signs of immaturity, it has attracted favorable comment due to the vivid realization of the three major characters: Roderick Hudson, superbly gifted but unstable and unreliable; Rowland Mallet, Roderick's limited but much more mature friend and patron; and Christina Light, one of James's most enchanting and maddening femmes fatales. The pair of Hudson and Mallet has been seen as representing the two sides of James's own nature: the wildly imaginative artist and the brooding conscientious mentor. Maurice Bernard Sendak (1928-2012) was an American author and illustrator of children's books. He became most widely known for his book Where the Wild Things Are, first published in 1963.