INSCRIBED BY JOHN MCPHEE

MCPHEE, John. The Pine Barrens. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, (1968). Octavo, original green cloth, original dust jacket. $1650.

First edition of McPhee's widely-praised look at the people, history and vast landscape of New Jersey's Pine Barrens, a handsome presentation copy inscribed on the half title by him in the year of publication, "For Mr. W. E— L— with best wishes, John McPhee, June 13, 1968."

The Pine Barrens is McPhee's "elegy on the million-acre sprawl of gnarled pitch-pine forest, cedar lakes, meandering rivers and coastal wetlands that sit incongruously in the middle of the Eastern Seaboard megalopolis… It will be a long time before another book appears to equal the literary quality and human compassion of this one… a classic" (New York Times). "For many people Pine Barrens is their favorite McPhee book… he envisions the pines as a locus classicus, the place in America where cultural traditions of North and South meet, where pre-Revolutionary history is recorded and post-Bicentennial battles will be fought by developers and ecologists" (Howarth in John McPhee Reader). "Using his fine eye, great ear and good heart" (Newsday), the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist "captures something of the dreamlike quality of this incredibly quiet land in the midst of the noisy clutter of mechanical civilization" (Kansas City Star). "First printing, 1968" on copyright page. With illustrations by James Graves. Initially serialized in the New Yorker. Separate gift inscription below McPhee's.

A fine inscribed copy in bright price-clipped dust jacket.