CHURCHILL, Winston S.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

A Roving Commission. Second US printing, inscribed by the author on the half-title, "Inscribed by Winston S. Churchill Jan 1932". Churchill spent 1 to 22 January in Nassau in the Bahamas, recuperating after his near-fatal car collision in New York on 13 December 1931. He returned to New York on 25 January and remained until the end of the month; on 28 January he delivered a lecture on the "Pathway of the English Speaking Peoples" to an audience of 2,000.This was Churchill's only volume of autobiography, retitled from its British publication under My Early Life. It covers his formative years from his birth in 1874 until his election as MP for Oldham in 1900. Among his most widely read works, it gives a "witty and elegiac account of his youth shot through with regret at the decline of the social and imperial order in which he had grown up" (ODNB).The first printing was issued in October 1930 (slightly following the British edition) and this second printing in December. The jacket rear flap, quoting American reviews, differs from Cohen, who does not note a change from the first printing jacket. Provenance: the collection of Steve Forbes, chairman of Forbes Magazine, and presidential candidate in the 1996 and 2000 US elections.

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