Last Nights of Paris

New York: The Macaulay Company. Good. 1929. First American Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket, but encased in a nice-looking facsimile reproduction of the original first edition jacket; see 2nd image posted with this listing) [heavy shelfwear and fraying to bottom edges and corners, soiling to covers, browning to spine cloth; a triangular piece is torn away at the top corner of pp.91/92, resulting in the loss of a couple of words]. Originally published in France in 1928 (as "Les Dernières Nuits de Paris"), this "best novel revealing modern Parisian life" follows a prostitute around the city through the night until dawn, when "her labor ends and she goes to a final rendezvous at the Champs Elysees where gather a strange company. Among them is the homicidal sailor, her brother Octave, whose mania is to destroy Paris in one terrible holocaust, and Volpe, the mysterious, who makes use of them all, employs their perversities for a secret end." The jacket blurb makes the somewhat fanciful claim that no less a literary personage than Guillaume Apollinaire, "on his death bed," had designated Soupault as "the new chief of modern French letters"; true or not, the author was an interesting guy -- a poet, novelist, literary critic and political activist who was originally a Dadaist but later became a co-founder, with André Breton, of the Surrealist movement. The fact that the English translation was done by one of America's great homegrown poets, William Carlos Williams, makes for an interesting intersection of French and American strains of literary modernism. NOTE again that this book bears a FACSIMILE dust jacket, which has not been factored in to our pricing. . (Inventory #: 29328)