The Unvanquished (Signed limited edition)

New York: Random House, 1938. First Edition. Near Fine. Octavo, original half burgundy cloth and patterned paper boards, top edge gilt. Number 164 of two hundred fifty signed copies. Complete with author's signature on the limitation page. A Near Fine copy of the book with the spine a bit faded and a previous owner's stamp on the half-title, otherwise a very pleasing copy. Lacking the publisher's acetate jacket, but with a new mylar.

Personal responsibility and the fall of Old Southern gentility take center stage in Faulkner's The Unvanquished. Set in Mississippi and spanning the Civil War and Reconstruction, the story follows the Sartoris family and their attempt to maintain a sense of identity as the nation changes. "Having chosen warfare as the exciting backdrop for The Unvanquished, Faulkner writes of it well. By the time of the fall of Vicksburg, when the novel begins, the Confederate defeats at Shiloh and Corinth had opened northern Mississippi to the Federal armies...the border region of north Mississippi was overrun by both the Union and Confederate armies but controlled by neither" (Brown). In this chaos, the protagonist Bayard Sartoris grows from naïve boy to a young man with a greater understanding of the violent tensions that class and race can cause, both for individuals and their communities. Near Fine.