Alexander's Bridge (Biographer's Copy)

Cambridge, MA : Houghton Mifflin Company, 1922 Houghton Mifflin Company, Cambridge, MA. 1922. Hardcover. This is stated on the title page to be a "New Edition with a Preface" of the 1912 original thus it is a 2nd Edition. This book has a stamped signature on the title page of James Woodress, who used this book in his biography of Willa titled Willa Cather: A Literary Life (1987). The book is full of notations, underlining, and 3 loose paper notes about the 1912 and 1922 editions. The endpapers are full of his summations of the contents and meanings of the book. Book Condition: Fair; mostly due to the missing FFFP and the internal hinges being torn but not detached; wear to head, tail, and tips. No DJ. Blue cloth boards and spine with suntanned spine and faint gilt lettering; tarnished gilt lettering on the front board. 174 pp 12mo. This was her first novel; a taut psychological drama about the fragility of human connections featuring high society on an international stage rather than the immigrant prairie characters she later became known for. Bartley Alexander is a world-renowned engineer and bridge builder, whose life begins to unravel when he encounters a former lover in London. As he shuttles among his wife in Boston, his old flame in London, and a massive bridge he is building in Canada, Alexander finds himself increasingly tormented. But the threatened collapse of his marriage presages a more fatal catastrophe, the collapse of the bridge which takes his life. A clean very presentable copy.