“THE MAJOR ESTHETIC ACHIEVEMENT OF ANY LIVING AMERICAN WRITER”: FIRST EDITION OF BLOOD MERIDIAN, INSCRIBED BY CORMAC MCCARTHY

MCCARTHY, Cormac. Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West. New York: Random House, (1985). Octavo, original half red cloth, original dust jacket. $28,000.

First edition of McCarthy’s mythic vision of the American West, inscribed by him, "For Bonnie All the best from your friend Cormac."

Compared the works of Dante, Poe, Melville and Faulkner; Harold Bloom called Blood Meridian "clearly the major esthetic achievement of any living American writer." To fellow novelist Madison Smartt Bell, "McCarthy puts most other American writers to shame… His diction and phrasing come from all over the evolutionary history of English and combine into a prose that seems to invent itself as it unfolds, resembling Elizabethan language in its flux of remarkable possibilities" (New York Times). Here "landscape and existence assume a mythic, phantasmagoric quality… a total repudiation of the romantic versions of the Old West and a projection in their place of nightmare" (Publisher's Weekly). Little noticed at the time of publication, most copies of the first edition were remaindered— this copy, however, has no remainder mark on the bottom of the text block.

Book with a bit of soiling along front joint; dust jacket with one small closed tear to front panel, minimal wear to spine ends, crease to front flap. A near-fine copy.