Robert Penn Warren’s dark pastoral of love, betrayal and violence, in one of only 300 signed copies.
WARREN, Robert Penn. Meet Me in the Green Glen. New York: Random House, 1971.
First edition, signed limited issue. One of 300 numbered copies printed on special paper, specially bound and signed by the author, this being copy no. 58.
Octavo, 376 pages. Original quarter brown cloth over natural linen boards, Warren’s facsimile signature stamped in gilt on the upper board and spine lettered in gilt; top edge stained brown, fore-edge untrimmed. In the original glassine dust wrapper and publisher’s board slipcase.
Random House produced this separate signed issue alongside the trade edition, limiting it to just 300 copies. Each was printed on special paper, specially bound, individually numbered and signed by Warren. This copy retains the complete original presentation, including the fragile glassine wrapper and fitted slipcase.
Published twenty-five years after All the King’s Men, Meet Me in the Green Glen returns to the rural South and to the moral territory that occupied Warren throughout his fiction: desire, guilt, violence and the stories people construct to explain their own actions.
At its centre is Angelo Passetto, an itinerant young man who enters the enclosed world of a Tennessee farm and begins an affair with Cassie Spottwood, the dissatisfied wife of an invalid. What initially resembles a pastoral love story gradually becomes a darker narrative of jealousy, betrayal, revenge and murder. The idyllic “green glen” of the title becomes an imagined refuge whose promise cannot survive contact with possessiveness, memory and consequence.
Robert Penn Warren occupied a singular position in American letters as novelist, poet, critic and teacher. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for All the King’s Men and later two Pulitzer Prizes for poetry. Meet Me in the Green Glen was his ninth novel.
Condition: Near fine in the original glassine wrapper and a very good publisher’s slipcase. Binding firm and attractive, with bright gilt. Pages clean and fore-edge untrimmed. Warren’s signature and limitation number 58 are clear and bold. Glassine with light handling wear, creasing and minor age-related clouding; slipcase with rubbing, surface marks and modest wear to edges and corners, but sound.
