Books published by publisher Harcourt Brace and Company ( 2013 )

The Human Comedy, Saroyan's first novel, is the story of an American family in wartime, and in particular of Homer Macauley, the fastest messenger in San Joaquin valley. With all the qualities of warmth, cheer, and humanity which have endeared Saroyan to his reading public, The Human Comedy abounds in unforgettable scenes. Homer running the Two-Twenty hurdles; little Ulysses imprisoned in a bear trap in Covington's store; old-time telegraph operator Willie Grogan, with a bottle in the desk drawer to fuzz the sharp reality of the everflowing messages of love and hope and pain and death; Spangler, with a love for the whole world and every living thing; Homer's older brother Marcus singing, as the troop train in which he sits hurtles away from home. Saroyan has done many things, but he has here done something which even his oldest friends scarcely dared to predict -- a wartime novel of the home front which succeeds in capturing, and which nowhere oversteps, the modesty of ordinary human beings. It is a very simple novel. It is a very great achievement. With jacket and many drawings by Don Freeman.

New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935. First U.S. Edition. Octavo, 86 pp. . Black cloth, gilt spine imprinting, jacket. Fine, sparkling book in a very good jacket showing edgewear and some age darkening, notably at spine. Gallup A29f. Eliot's play, the story of Thomas a Becket, in which a man of God stands as a spiritual beacon against the darkness of a despotic temporal power, was actually banned in Romania under the Ceausescu régime. Generally well regarded - for a play by a poet - it reflects Eliot's philosophical bent while respectfully dallying with dramatic forms of much earlier eras, and in so doing makes the choice of an overused historical vehicle more palatable. Handsome copy. L6