PYNCHON, Thomas. Gravity's Rainbow. New York: The Viking Press, 1973.
8vo. Original orange cloth with embossed design to upper board; spine lettered in red; upper edge orange; pictorial dust jacket with a design by Marc Getter; pp. [viii], 3-760, [ii]; a near-fine copy, lightly compressed to spine ends; in very good, clipped jacket, faded to spine (as is common), lightly rubbed and worn to extremities, particularly along the spine.
First edition, in a later state dust jacket - or possibly one intended for export - which has the ISBN 670-34832-5 to the lower panel, but lacking the '0273' code to the front flap which denotes the first issue.
Pynchon's National Book Award-winning novel is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II. Widely considered to be his greatest work, it was selected by the jury for the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but was rejected by the Pulitzer Advisory Board due to its controversial content. The novel features a clandestine military organisation investigating the apparent correlation between the targeting of V-2 rockets and the erections of Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, an American intelligence agent who was once the subject of experiments by a Nazi rocket scientist. It is not surprising that the novel was deemed a little outré by the rather staid committee.
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