"I HAVE NEVER BEFORE BEEN REQUESTED TO TAKE AN IMMEDIATE OPINION ON THE QUESTION OF THE ANNIHILATION OF CIVILIZATION": THE SUNDIAL, INSCRIBED BY SHIRLEY JACKSON

JACKSON, Shirley. The Sundial. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, (1958). Octavo, original half gray cloth, original dust jacket. $4200.

First edition of Jackson’s bleakly satirical novel, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper: "For Eleanor and Franklin, affectionately, Shirley."

Appearing only one year before her classic horror novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959), Shirley Jackson's Sundial shares that work's psychologically thrilling approach to terror in its own story of 12 people living in an isolated mansion, awaiting the prophesied end of the world. It is a tale that again confirms Jackson's "jeweler's eye for the microscopic degrees by which a personality creeps into madness" (Jonathan Letham, Salon), "written with the kind of humor that would make a guillotine laugh" (Victor LaValle, Slate). Jackson was, as The New York Times observed, always "a true storyteller, with a rich and haunted imagination, and she could walk unafraid in regions where love and murder have each other's names and speak each other's tongues." Barron 6-182. Tymn 4-120.

Very slight toning and rubbing to spine ends and dust jacket spine. A near-fine inscribed copy.