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Details
GREENE, Graham. Brighton Rock. New York: The Viking Press, 1938.
8o. Original red, black and silver cloth (lightly rubbed); pictorial dust jacket (three pinholes on spine, light soiling). Provenance: Vivien Greene, the author's wife (presentation inscription).
FIRST EDITION OF GREENE'S FIRST MAJOR NOVEL. A SUPERB ASSOCIATION COPY, INSCRIBED BY GREENE TO HIS WIFE on the half-title: "For my love eternally, V.G. G.G. June 1938." The American edition was published in June, one month before the London edition by Heinemann. This was the second of Greene's novels (after This Gun for Hire) to be published in the United States prior to Great Britain.
Greene met his wife Vivien after she responded heatedly to an article he had written. In 1925 he penned an article for the Oxford Outlook which linked sex, religion and the cinema. His thesis was that most people were "considerably oversexed: We either go to Church and worship the Virgin Mary or to a public house and snigger over stories and limericks; and this exaggeration of the sex instinct has had a bad effect on art, on the cinematograph as well as the stage." This sweeping generalization brought him a short, sharp rebuke from Vivien Dayrell Browning. She wrote that one does not "worship" the Virgin Mary, one "venerated" her, the correct term being "hyperdulia." When Greene met his reader, he found an attractive 19 year old published poet who was working as a cleark at Blackwell's publishing firm. They quickly fell in love and Greene converted to Catholicism to please Vivien. They were married 15 October 1927 and had two children before Greene had his first affair with the illustrator Dorothy Glover (their joint collections of Victorian Detective Fiction was published in 1966). Greene later left Glover for Catherine Walston, perhaps his greatest love. Vivien, staunchly religious, granted Greene a separation but the two were never divorced. Wobbe A13b.
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FIRST EDITION OF GREENE'S FIRST MAJOR NOVEL. A SUPERB ASSOCIATION COPY, INSCRIBED BY GREENE TO HIS WIFE on the half-title: "For my love eternally, V.G. G.G. June 1938." The American edition was published in June, one month before the London edition by Heinemann. This was the second of Greene's novels (after This Gun for Hire) to be published in the United States prior to Great Britain.
Greene met his wife Vivien after she responded heatedly to an article he had written. In 1925 he penned an article for the Oxford Outlook which linked sex, religion and the cinema. His thesis was that most people were "considerably oversexed: We either go to Church and worship the Virgin Mary or to a public house and snigger over stories and limericks; and this exaggeration of the sex instinct has had a bad effect on art, on the cinematograph as well as the stage." This sweeping generalization brought him a short, sharp rebuke from Vivien Dayrell Browning. She wrote that one does not "worship" the Virgin Mary, one "venerated" her, the correct term being "hyperdulia." When Greene met his reader, he found an attractive 19 year old published poet who was working as a cleark at Blackwell's publishing firm. They quickly fell in love and Greene converted to Catholicism to please Vivien. They were married 15 October 1927 and had two children before Greene had his first affair with the illustrator Dorothy Glover (their joint collections of Victorian Detective Fiction was published in 1966). Greene later left Glover for Catherine Walston, perhaps his greatest love. Vivien, staunchly religious, granted Greene a separation but the two were never divorced. Wobbe A13b.