8vo. Original pale green cloth; dust jacket (light spotting to extremes, tiny closed tear to foot).

FIRST EDITION of the author’s Pulitzer Prize-winning posthumous novel and one of only 2500 copies printed. In the FIRST ISSUE dust jacket with a review by Walker Percy on the rear panel. “This novel has a sad history behind it. The author sent it to every publisher in America, all of whom rejected it. After the final rejection (by Knopf) Toole committed suicide. He was only thirty–two. His mother gave the manuscript to Walker Percy, who secured its publication by Louisiana State University Press, and it was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. Its virtues have now been universally recognized… New Orleans can be the same again after Toole’s comic masterpiece” (Burgess, 99 Novels 125).