FIRST EDITION OF JOHN WILLIAMS' ONLY NATIONAL BOOK AWARD-WINNING NOVEL, AUGUSTUS

WILLIAMS, John. Augustus. New York: Viking, (1972). Octavo, original half green cloth, cartographic endpapers, original dust jacket. $950.

First edition of Williams' "spectacular historical saga," the last published in his lifetime, winner of the 1973 National Book Award, a fine copy.

"The genius of this astonishing American writer is that he shows how lives that seem utterly strange can be very like our own" (Gray, New Statesman). Augustus, the last novel published in Williams' lifetime, followed his 1965 novel, Stoner, which ultimately won acclaim as "the greatest novel you've never heard of" (New Yorker). Williams' exploration of the life of the Roman emperor, praised as a "spectacular historical saga," was his only National Book Award winner, sharing the honor with John Barth's Chimera in 1973. As in all of Williams' extraordinary work, Augustus explores how "the lives we end up with are the often unexpected products of the friction between us and the world itself" (Daniel Mendelsohn).

A fine copy.