GREEN, Henry.

£1,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Caught. A Novel. First edition of this wartime Hogarth Press novel, in the scarce jacket designed by fellow firefighter Leonard Rosoman. Inspired by the author's own time in the Auxiliary Fire Service during the Blitz, this novel saw Green come "closer than any other English writer of the time to the shocked verisimilitude of English poets of the First World War" (Treglown, p. 141).While London was under the Blitz, Green was "responding to air raids, frequenting jazz clubs, falling serially in love, socializing with other firemen, and writing one of his best novels, [Caught,] which amounted to a virtual live feed of all that activity" (Robson). The publishers faced difficulties with publishing such a frank account while the war continued. To assuage concerns over its themes of adultery, Green simply turned the protagonist into a widower. Leonard Woolf, however, was left to lament that the work exposed the fire service "as completely inefficient and corrupt from top to bottom without a single redeeming feature or even averagely competent and honest person in it" (Treglown, p. 148).

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