8vo. Original turquoise cloth stamped in gilt and black (sunning to spine, light rubbing, sticker residue at upper right of front board); dust jacket (sticker residue at upper right of front dust jacket, toning to extremities). Provenance: Marvin Josephson Associates (Kurt Vonnegut's literary agency; calling card pasted on to front free endpaper).

FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING in the first state dust jacket priced $5.95 and with the correct code of 0369 at the foot of the rear flap. Based on Vonnegut's own experiences as a POW who survived the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945, Slaughterhouse-Five was Vonnegut's first bestseller. Almost immediately upon publication it became one of the most frequently challenged books in the United States public school system. In a landmark 1982 ruling brought before the Supreme Court over the book's removal from a public school, the Court declared that "local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to 'prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion'." Despite this, the book remains one of the most banned books in the United States. Currey, p.504; Karolides, et al., 100 Banned Books pp.133-141.