Landmark Books in All Fields
ItemID: #125360
Cost: $5,500.00

All Quiet on the Western Front

Erich Maria Remarque

"HE FELL IN OCTOBER, 1918, ON A DAY THAT WAS SO QUIET AND SO STILL… THAT THE ARMY REPORT CONFINED ITSELF TO THE SINGLE SENTENCE": IMPORTANT FIRST EDITION IN ENGLISH OF ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, IN ORIGINAL DUST JACKET

REMARQUE, Erich Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front. Translated from the German by A.W. Wheen. London: G.P. Putnam's Sons, (1929). Octavo, original cream cloth, original dust jacket. $5500.

First edition in English, published just two months after the first German book edition, of Remarque's starkly realistic classic, a landmark novel of the 20th century, a handsome copy in the very elusive original dust jacket.

Erich Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front "is an indictment of a 'civilization' that could descend to such warfare with its anomic consequences" (Books of the Century, 173). "It affronted the National Socialists, who read it as slanderous to their ideals of home and fatherland… In 1933 all of Remarque's works were consigned to the infamous bonfires… Jonathon Green in his Encyclopedia of Censorship identifies All Quiet on the Western Front as one of the 'most often' censored books" (Karolides et al., 6-7). "It is a book of terrible experiences, at times crude because of the necessity of telling the absolute truth, at times rising to an almost incredible degree of tragedy and at times relieved by humorous incidents and examples of rough good-comradeship. It will shock the supersensitive by its outspokenness; it will leave no reader unmoved" (New York Times Book Review). Basis for the Academy Award-winning 1930 film that won Best Picture and Best Director for Lewis Milestone. First edition in English: preceded same year by the first German edition, Im Westen nichts Neues. Serialized in 1928 in the Vossiche Zeitung. First-printing dust jacket with "German Opinions" on front flap.

Text quite fresh with faint foxing to cloth of near-fine book; edge-wear, faint toning to spine of bright extremely good dust jacket.

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