The Red and the Black (Easton Press Collector's Edition)

A$80 · Offered by Harry Hartog Rare Books

STENDHAL (Marie-Henri Beyle; trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff; intro. Hamilton Basso; illus. Rafaello Busoni). The Red and the Black. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1980. Large 8vo. Full red leather. Spine with five raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. xvii, 450 pp. Colour illustrations by Rafaello Busoni throughout. Collector's Edition. Part of the "100 Greatest Books Ever Written" series. First Easton Press edition. Marie-Henri Beyle (1783–1842), who published his major works under the pseudonym Stendhal, wrote Le Rouge et le Noir in 1830 and had it published that same year in Paris. He was forty-seven. The novel he had produced was one that his own era did not fully understand — it was too psychologically acute, too politically sardonic, too willing to present its protagonist without moral simplification. It took the better part of the nineteenth century before Stendhal's reputation settled into what it has since remained: one of the founders of the realist novel and, alongside Balzac and Flaubert, one of the three indispensable writers of nineteenth-century French fiction. The novel follows Julien Sorel, the brilliantly intelligent and ferociously ambitious son of a provincial carpenter in the fictional town of Verrières, who sets out to rise in a society that has closed its avenues of advancement to men of his class since the fall of Napoleon. The routes available are the church and the drawing room — t

• Binding: Hardcover

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