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Compton Mackenzie : Extemes Meet

Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., Garden City Park, New York, 1928

12mo - over 6¾" - 7¾" tall. AP3 - A first edition (stated) hardcover book in good condition in good dust jacket that is mylar protected. Dust jacket has corners of the flaps clipped, wrinkling, chipping, crease, small tears, and few moderate tears on the edges and corners, some wrinkling and chipping on the sides, some scattered light smudge and scuffing, tanning and light shelf wear. Book has some bumped corners and cover edgewear, lightly moisture soiled, light darkened top page edges, label adhered on the front fixed endpaper, really loose hinge showing net after the front free endpaper, light tanning and shelf wear. Although not marked in any way, this copy comes from the personal collection of Otto Penzler, legendary editor and founder of the Mysterious Press, an award-winning icon in the genre. 7.5"x5.25", 316 pages. Satisfaction Guaranteed. Compton Mackenzie (Sir Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie), was an English-born Scottish writer of fiction, biography, histories and a memoir, as well as a cultural commentator, raconteur and lifelong Scottish nationalist. He was one of the co-founders in 1928 of the Scottish National Party along with Hugh MacDiarmid, RB Cunninghame Graham and John MacCormick. He was knighted in 1952. Mackenzie is perhaps best known for two comic novels set in Scotland: Whisky Galore (1947) set in the Hebrides, and The Monarch of the Glen (1941) set in the Scottish Highlands. They were the sources of a successful film and a television series respectively. He published almost a hundred books on different subjects, including ten volumes of autobiography: My Life and Times (1963-71). He wrote history (on the Battle of Marathon and the Battle of Salamis), biography (Mr Roosevelt, a 1943 biography of FDR), literary criticism, satires, apologia (Sublime Tobacco 1957), children's stories, poetry and so on. Of his fiction, The Four Winds of Love is sometimes considered his magnum opus. He was admired by F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose first book, This Side of Paradise, was written under the literary influence of Compton. Sinister Street, his lengthy 1913-14 bildungsroman, influenced such young men as George Orwell and Cyril Connolly, who both read it as schoolboys. Max Beerbohm praised Mackenzie's writing for vividness and emotional reality. Frank Swinnerton, a literary critic, comments on Mackenzie's "detail and wealth of reference". John Betjeman said of it, "This has always seemed to me one of the best novels of the best period in English novel writing." Henry James thought it to be the most remarkable book written by a young author in his lifetime. After his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1914, Mackenzie explored religious themes in a trilogy of novels, The Altar Steps (1922), The Parson's Progress (1923) and The Heavenly Ladder (1924). Following his time on Capri, socialising with the gay exiles there, he treated the homosexuality of a politician sensitively in Thin Ice (1956). He was the literary critic for the London-based national newspaper Daily Mail. A novel which ranks with Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four as outstanding political satire but with perhaps more humour is The Lunatic Republic (1959). For the version of English spoken by the inhabitants of Lunamania on the far side of the moon, Mackenzie invented over 150 new words.. Book Condition: Good. Binding: Hardcover. Jacket: Good

First Edition

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