SASSOON, Siegfried Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1929.
8vo., publisher's cream cloth boards, upper board with lettering printed in black, and 'Fox' device in black and red; backstrip lettered in black with printed red label; lower board with red device and publisher's name in black; outer edges untrimmed; pictorial endpapers and devices by William Nicholson, along with an additional seven full-page illustrations; pp. [viii], 9-295, [i]; browning to free endpapers, previous owner's signature to ffep, boards very clean, very good.
First illustrated edition, printed at the Chiswick Press. Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man was Sassoon's first foray into the world of prose, having previously concentrated solely on poetry. Sassoon was motivated to write the work after a war incident, when a fox was loose in the trenches and one of his friends shot and killed it. The book also draws heavily on his pre-war life, with riding and hunting being among the favourite pastimes of the author, and is a brutally moving tale of the loss of innocence. The book won both the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and has been a set text in schools ever since its publication.
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