Dream's End

Author: James Thorne Smith (1892-1934) inscribedYear: 1927Publisher: Robert M McBride and CompanyPlace: New YorkDescription: 342 pages. Small octavo (7 3/4" x 5 1/2") bound in original publisher's blue cloth with front board and spine lettered in gilt in original pictorial jacket. Inscribed by the author. First edition. Meandering labyrinth of a story about a New York advertising executive who leaves his job in the city to write poetry in a hut by the sea. Although entranced by the ocean and the miles of sand and the salt marshes, David finds himself caught in the coils of his attraction to two women: Hilda, "the mate to his flame, the answering spark," but despairing and fragile (and married), and Scarlet, seductive and available (but morally rotten). Hilda's husband is a sadistic libertine whose subtle cruelties are slowly killing his wife; a situation that so unsettles the poet's wits that he falls prey to a heavily symbolic dream obsession. Smith successfully establishes a surreal