Roth, Philip

Our Gang

ISBN: 039447886X
New York, NY: Random House, 1971. First Edition. Hardcover. "Our Gang is Philip Roth's first book since Portnoy's Complaint. Those readers who have followed Mr. Roth's career from its beginnings will not be surprised to find him moving in a new and startling direction. If, as some critics wrote, Portnoy's Complaint was the funniest book ever written on sex in America, then Our Gang may turn out to be the funniest book yet written on American politics. Once again Philip Roth has taken a seemingly familiar subject, and with his fiercely comic imagination, carried it to a revealingly bizarre extreme. It is difficult to think of another American literary work of such sustained satiric thrust and irreverent inventiveness as Our Gang. The hero- or villian- of Our Gang is Trick E. Dixon, self-pronounced legal whiz, peace-loving "Quaker," and somehow President of the United States. "Tricky," as imagined by Roth, is a hypocritical opportunist such as might be found in a comedy by Moliere; and his public language is a merciless parody of that "candid" Presidential prose which is an amalgam of anesthetizing cliches." (from front flap) The fifth published work, & fourth full-length novel by Philip Roth (1933-2018), the great, award-winning & prolific Jewish-American author whose works have been enshrined (since before he died, a particular honor) in the Library of America series along with his canonical contemporaries Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud et al. In this novel, published in the wake of his hilariously scurrilous popular classic Portnoy's Complaint (see our item No. 4756), Roth satirizes a very thinly disguised Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon, then in his first (& only full as we know in hindsight) term as President, & his cohort of associates including Henry Kissinger & the notorious Vice President Spiro Agnew. While full of side-splitting humor at the peak of the singular Roth style, this novel "...is plainly a work conceived in moral indignation." (front flap) Hardcover in unclipped first-issue dust jacket (with $5.95 price printed on front flap, "11/71" on rear flap), first edition as stated on copyright page. Another essential collectible in the iconic Roth oeuvre, in its rarest original form & in relatively strongly fine condition: Book fine with very light rubbing, fading to front, back covers & spine (lettering, graphics on spine & front board completely bright & intact); mild wear, browning & some tiny bumps, creases at edges & corners of same; mild browning, rubbing & occasional spotting, tiny scratches to side & lower edges of text block; mild fading & spotting to red-dyed upper edge of same. Interior fine with just a hint of browning to blank white paste-downs, endpapers & page leaves (the latter mostly at blank margins/edges); a previous owner's full name signed in cursive black ink at upper margin of front endpaper; another previous owner's single (first or last?) name in darker, thicker non-cursive black ink just above & to right thereof. Dust jacket fine with mild rubbing, browning, scratching & a few short, faint creases to front, back covers, spine & flaps; mild wear & some tiny bumps, creases at edges & corners of same; small purple stain/mark at blank inside lower spine, undetectable at outside of same. Fine / Fine. [Item #5154]

Price: $150.00