Books

New York: Pantheon, 1962. First American edition of the Nobel Prize-winning author's first book. Octavo, original red cloth. Fine in a near fine dust jacket with light shelfwear to the spine. Association copy, inscribed by the author to poet Robert Lowell in a German inscription, translated into English, which reads: "To Robert Lowell, in admiration and in the hope to have the pleasure of meeting you soon in Berlin. Gunter Grass Berlin, Nov 3, 1966." Association copies of this caliber are rare, especially on what is considered his masterpiece. From the estate of Elizabeth Hardwick, novelist and wife of Robert Lowell. Translated by Ralph Manheim. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. When Günter Grass published "The Tin Drum" in 1959 it was as if German literature had been granted a new beginning after decades of linguistic and moral destruction. Within the pages of this, his first novel, Grass recreated the lost world from which his creativity sprang, Danzig, his home…

The Tin Drum is a novel by Günter Grass, considered one of the author's masterpieces and one of the key novels of the 20th century. The novel is the first book of Grass's Danzig Trilogy, and it tells the story of Oskar Matzerath, a boy who wills himself to stop growing and communicates through his tin drum. The book is a richly imaginative tale that combines history, folklore, and political commentary, presenting a surreal account of the rise of Nazism and the horrors of World War II.