The Collected Works of Jane Bowles
New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1966. 1st Edition. Octavo, publisher's buckram cloth, spine stamped in red and pink, upper board stamped in red, top edge stained lavender, maroon endpapers, original dust jacket.
First edition of modernist writer and playwright Jane Bowles’s collected works with an introduction by Truman Capote. While Bowles was privately prolific, she published very little in her lifetime; this volume comprises of all of her published work up to this point: her cult classic Two Serious Ladies, which follows two upper-class women vacationing in Panama and their oddball adventures, her play "In the Summer House," and her slender collection of short stories Plain Pleasures. In his introduction, Capote deems Bowles "one of the really original pure-stylists" and remarks if he held anything against her, it was her lamentably small body of work. Bowles was the wife of fellow writer Paul Bowles, with whom she had an eccentric relationship. Both were openly bisexual, essentially rivals within their literary community, and predominantly spent their lives apart from each other, geographically and romantically. Jane remarked that at first sight she considered Paul "an enemy" and that "Paul and I are so incompatible that we should be in a museum." Dust jacket design by Ronald Clyne. Trace of old pencil price to front endpaper. Top stain faded, light toning to board edges, light age-toning to textblock; price-clipped dust jacket with minor soiling. Near fine. Item #13198
$100.00