Search results 94 Found

New York: Random House, 1979. First Trade Edition [stated]. First printing [per Random House printing convention]. Hardcover. Good. [10], 515, [3] pages. No dust jacket present. The cover has some wear and soiling. Slightly cocked. As the fierce lovemaking and fights of Nathan, a paranoiac Jewish intellectual, and Sophie, a Polish-Catholic concentration-camp survivor, intensify, Stingo, a writer who lives below them in a cheap rooming house, becomes more and more involved in their lives. The book won the National Book Award and it is a *Burgess 99* title. Made into the 1982 Alan J. Pakula movie starring Kevin Kline & Meryl Streep. William Clark Styron Jr. (June 11, 1925 - November 1, 2006) was an American novelist and essayist who won major literary awards for his work. . Styron's childhood was a difficult one. His father, a shipyard engineer, had clinical depression, which Styron himself would later experience. Styron enrolled in Davidson College. Styron transferred to Duke University in 1943 as a part of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps V-12 program aimed at fast-tracking officer candidates by enrolling them simultaneously in basic training and bachelor's degree programs. There he published his first fiction, a short story heavily influenced by William Faulkner, in an anthology of student work. Styron published several short stories in the university literary magazine, The Archive, between 1944 and 1946. Though Styron was made a lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps, the Japanese surrendered before his ship left San Francisco. After the war, he returned to full-time studies at Duke and completed his Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in English in 1947. Sophie's Choice is a 1979 novel by American author William Styron. The author's last novel, it concerns the relationships among three people sharing a boarding house in Brooklyn: Stingo, a young aspiring writer from the South, Jewish scientist Nathan Landau, and his lover Sophie, a Polish-Catholic survivor of the German Nazi concentration camps, whom Stingo befriends. It was controversial for the way in which it framed Styron's personal views regarding the Holocaust. Stingo, a novelist who is recalling the summer when he began his first novel, has been fired from his low-level reader's job at the publisher McGraw-Hill and has moved into a cheap boarding house in Brooklyn, where he hopes to devote some months to his writing. While he is working on his novel, he is drawn into the lives of the lovers Nathan Landau and Sophie Zawistowska, fellow boarders at the house, who are involved in an intense and difficult relationship. The beautiful Sophie is Polish and Catholic, and a survivor of the Holocaust and Nazi concentration camps, and Nathan is a Jewish-American and purportedly a genius. Although Nathan claims to be a Harvard graduate and a cellular biologist with a pharmaceutical company, it is revealed that this story is a fabrication. Almost no one—including Sophie and Stingo—knows that Nathan has paranoid schizophrenia and that he is abusing stimulants. He sometimes behaves quite normally and generously, but there are times when he becomes frighteningly jealous, violent, abusive, and delusional. As the story progresses, Sophie tells Stingo of her past. She describes her violently anti-Semitic father, a law professor in Kraków; her unwillingness to help him spread his ideas; her arrest by the Nazis; and particularly, her brief stint as a stenographer-typist in the home of Rudolf Höss, the commander of Auschwitz, where she was interned. She specifically relates her attempts to seduce Höss in an effort to persuade him that her blond, blue-eyed, German-speaking son should be allowed to leave the camp and enter the Lebensborn program, in which he would be raised as a German child. She failed in this attempt, and ultimately, never learned of her son's fate. Only at the end of the book does the reader also learn what became of Sophie's daughter, Eva. Eventually, Nathan's delusions lead him to believe that Stingo is having an affair with Sophie and he threatens to kill them both. As Sophie and Stingo attempt to flee New York, Sophie reveals her deepest secret: On the night that she arrived at Auschwitz, a camp doctor made her choose which of her two children would die immediately by gassing and which would continue to live, albeit in the camp. Of her two children, Sophie chose to sacrifice her eight-year-old daughter, Eva, in a decision that has left her in mourning and filled with a guilt that Sophie cannot overcome. By now alcoholic and deeply depressed, Sophie is willing to self-destruct with Nathan, who already has tried to persuade her to die by suicide with him. Despite Stingo proposing marriage and a shared night that relieves Stingo of his virginity and fulfills many of his sexual fantasies, Sophie disappears, leaving only a note in which she says that she must return to Nathan. Upon arriving back in Brooklyn, Stingo is devastated to discover that Sophie and Nathan have killed themselves by ingesting sodium cyanide.

London: Jonathan Cape, 1979. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. First English edition. Bottom corners a little bumped, else fine in fine dustwrapper. Winner of the National Book Award. Meryl Streep won an Oscar for her portrayal of the title character in the 1982 film directed by Alan J. Pakula, and that also featured Kevin Kline and Peter MacNicol. *Burgess 99.*.

New York, New York: Random House, 1979. First Edition, First Printing. Hardcover. Octavo, 515 pages. In Very Good condition with Very Good condition dust jacket. Spine is light yellow with plum and brick red lettering. Dust jacket protected by mylar covering, price uncut: "$12.95" on front flap, has mild shelving wear along extremities and mild sun-fading along spine. Boards fully bound in publisher's plum cloth and have mild bumping to fore corners, mild discoloration along spine tail, and moderate creasing and bending wear along spine; spine mildly cocked. Textblock edges have light scuffing, soiling, and foxing, brown grease stain along fore edge pp.109-150 (interior margin mildly affected). Signed flat on front free-endpaper by William Styron. Shelved Room C. 1401112. Special Collections.

Random House, 1979-04-12. First Edition. hardcover. Good/Good. 9x6x1. Signed by Author. Random House, 1979; stated first trade edition, with full number line, SIGNED by Styron on ffep; 515pp. Binding is tight and sturdy, but cocked; corners of dark maroon cloth boards and ends of spine bumped; a bit of age-toning along top edge; gilt titling remains bright and bold. About 1" tear to tail of dust jacket spine; some creasing, age-toning. A bit of soiling to text block fore-edge, interior unaffected and free of markings. Ships same or next day from Dinkytown, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Random House, April 1979. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good. First Trade Edition stated, first printing with number line beginning with 2 (being the Random House designation of the first printing). Binding tight and square, corners and spine ends very mildly pushed but not rubbed. The dustjacket is not price-clipped, has no rubbing at the corners or the bottom of the spine, there are very short closed tears at the top of the spine and the front panel, and the spine is very slightly sunned. Signed by Styron with no inscription on the half title.

Random House Inc, 1979. Very Good Hardcover with Very Good dustjacket Signed by Styron Stated First Trade Edition. Signed. First Edition. Hard Cover. Very Good/Very Good.

First edition, special edition for friends of the publisher and author. Spine lightly sunned, near fine in a good only glassine dust jacket with the front panel detached (but present) and a toned spine. Laid in from the publisher is a handwritten menu on printed cardstock from the River Cafe in Brooklyn celebrating William Styron's birthday and Sophie's Choice on June 11, 1979. The celebration was attended by many figures on the New York literary scene including Kurt Vonnegut, Elizabeth Hardwick, Francine du Plessix Gray, John Marquand, and many others. The first trade edition had a large printing, thus this special edition is particularly desirable. Meryl Streep won an Oscar for her portrayal of the title character in the 1982 film directed by Alan J. Pakula, which also featured Kevin Kline and Peter MacNicol. A *Burgess 99* title and winner of the National Book Award.

New York: Random House, 1979. In a clear protective Brodart Cover. The novel of Sophie , the Polish catholic girl who bore the stamp of a cpncetration camp, who struggles with love in the presentr and her the events of her past. Basis for the excellent movie of the same name starring Meryl Streep. Light to front board, Light creasing to edge of flaps and to bottom end of dj spine. One small short-closed tear at top edge.. SIGNED Bookplate Laid-in. First Edition-First Printing. Hardcover. Near Fine/Near Fine. Book.

New York: Random House, 1979. First Trade Edition, First Printing. Hardcover. Octavo, 515 pages. In Very Good condition with Very Good minus dust jacket. Pale yellow spine with dark red text. Dust jacket is protected by mylar covering and has dark gray stain at tail edge of spine. Textblock clean. Full number line on copyright page with first trade edition statement. Signed by William Styron on second page. Shelved Room A. 1372919. Special Collections.

New York: Random House, 1979. Hardcover. Small 4to. Burgundy cloth with gilt spine lettering, dust jacket. 515pp. Near fine/near fine. Jacket spine ever-so-faintly sunned. Tight and lovely first trade edition, signed large and bold by Styron in black ballpoint on front flyleaf.