FARIÑA, Richard. Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. New York: Random House. 1966.
8vo. Publisher’s quarter binding with green cloth to spine and blue card over boards, lettered and illustrated with white, black and yellow, top-edge blue and fore-edges untrimmed, illustrated dust-jacket designed by Eric Von Schmidt with printed price of $5.95 to front flap; spine a little sunned and whites of jacket a little rubbed, minor shelfwear; ex-libris label front pastedown partially removed; very good.
First edition, first impression of Fariña's first and only novel.
Part campus novel, part travelogue, Richard Fariña's novel explores the complexities of early adulthood through its protagonist, Gnossos Pappadopoulis. He wrote the novel while still a student at Cornell University, where he shared a room with Thomas Pynchon, who described this book as coming ‘on like the hallelujah chorus done by 200 kazoo players with perfect pitch’. (Blurb)
After leaving Cornell, Fariña became a staple of the Greenwich Village art scene, befriending the likes of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, whose younger sister – Mimi – he would go on to marry in 1963. Fariña is often viewed as a bridge between the Beat Generation, and the hippie counter culture movement of the late 1960s. His life tends to raise more questions than it answers; tragically, he died in a motorcycle accident on the same day he signed copies of his book at the Carmel bookshop and café in California, published only two days before.
See, Barnett, Richard Fariña: lost genius who bridged the gap between beats and hippies (Guardian, 2016).
SKU: 2124653