Memoirs of Hecate County
Price: $100.00
Hard Cover. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1946. First Edition. Very Good / Dust Jacket Included.
First edition, first printing. Publisher’s green cloth with gilt decoration to front board, titles in gilt to spine, frontispiece photograph of Hecate statue; original gray and green dust jacket with titles in white. Near fine with light toning to cloth edges and pages, dusty top edge of text block, and some dimming to spine gilt; very good unclipped dust jacket with some toning to extremities, closed tear to upper portion of spine, some shallow chipping, and wear to head of spine and upper edges of panels. Overall, a handsome and sharp copy. Memoirs of Hecate County is a collection of thematically linked short stories and a novella, all of which feature an unnamed narrator. The short stories are: “The Man Who Shot Snapping Turtles,” “Ellen Terhune,” “Glimpses of Wilbur Flick,” “The Milhollands and their Damned Souls,” and “Mr. and Mrs. Blackburn at Home.” The novella, “The Princess with the Golden Hair,” tells of the narrator’s obsessive love for two women, a Ukrainian waitress named Anna Lenihan and the seductive and chronically injured Imogen Loomis. The novella’s descriptions of sex caused the book to be banned in the United States for more than a decade. The book’s stories take place in a fictional suburb, Hecate County, named after the Greek goddess associated with sorcery and the underworld. Wilson wrote that the stories, “are all about different kinds of people, but they all have…an odor of damnation.” He later claimed that Memoirs of Hecate County was his favorite book that he had written. Item #EDW009
