Books

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959. First edition of the author's first book and winner of the National Book Award. Octavo, original cloth. Boldly signed by actors Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw on the half-title page, who starred in the 1969 film bearing the same name. Very good in a very good dust jacket. Jacket design by Sanford Roth. "Goodbye Columbus, a Houghton Mifflin Literary Award, is Philip Roth’s first book, and an impressive one. There is blood here and vigor, love and hate, irony and compassion. Mr. Roth has written a perceptive, often witty and frequently moving piece of fiction." The novella is accompanied by five short stories that range in tone from the iconoclastic to the astonishingly tender that illuminate the subterranean conflicts between parents and children and friends and neighbors in the American Jewish diaspora. Saul Bellow wrote upon review of Goodbye, Columbus, "Unlike those of us who come howling into the world, blind and bare, Mr. Roth…

Goodbye, Columbus is a novella plus five short stories by Philip Roth, which won the National Book Award in 1960, and is a reflection on Jewish and middle-class life in America.