[Item #26081] Beauty Lies Beyond Hell! Howard W. ROPER.

Beauty Lies Beyond Hell!

New York: Ray Long & Richard Smith, 1932. First edition. Octavo (20.5cm.); original cloth in red and black dust jacket; [8],260pp. A few losses to jacket extremities, including to lower edge of upper panel affecting the "W" of "Howard W. Roper," and 2-inch loss to spine crown affecting all words of spine title except "Hell." Some additional uneven fading to rear panel and spine. Fine in an About Very Good copy of the scarce jacket.

A remarkable first (and only) novel by an apparently unknown writer, about whom we've been able to discover little other than that he was a 1925 graduate of the University of Wisconsin and a 1928 Harvard MBA. Nominally proletarian in theme and outlook, the novel's action is set among workers in a WW1 munitions plant; the characters are uniformly gritty, the setting stark and industrial. Stylistically, Roper's writing veers between stream-of-consciousness prose-poetry and a sort of cinematic montage, reminiscent but not imitative of John Dos Passos. Described as "A Novel New As Tomorrow" on upper jacket panel. OCLC locates nine copies in North America, none in Wisconsin. Not in Hanna.

Price: $150.00

Go Back