The Long Goodbye

$700 · Offered by Book Collector Inc

Author: Raymond Thornton Chandler (1888–1959) Year: 1954 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company Place: New York Description: 316 pages. Octavo (8 1/2" x 5 3/4") bound in original publisher's half blue cloth with green edges with black lettering to spine and cover in original pictorial jacket. (Bruccoli A10.1.b.) First American edition, first printing with an original run of 10,000 copies printed.. The English edition preceded the American by a few months. The Long Goodbye is a 1953 novel by Raymond Chandler, centered on his famous detective Philip Marlowe. While some critics consider it inferior to The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely , others rank it as the best of his work. Chandler himself, in a letter to a friend, called the novel "my best book" and recalled the agony of writing it while his wife was terminally ill. The novel is notable for using hard-boiled detective fiction as a vehicle for social criticism, as well as for including autobiographical elements from Chandler's life. In 1955, the novel received the Edgar Award for Best Novel. The Long Goodbye is Chandler's most personal novel. He wrote it as his wife was dying and her illness and eventual death had a profound effect on him, driving him into fits of melancholy as well as talk of and even attempts at suicide. The novel contains two characters obviously based on Chandler himself and both of them highlight Chandler's awareness of his own flaws such as alcoholism as well as his insecurities (e.g., in the value of h

• Printing: first
• Binding: Hardcover

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