That American Woman (INSCRIBED)

WAUGH, Alec.

That American Woman.

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1932. The U.S. issue of the novel published in London by Cassell in 1931 as So Lovers Dream.

Inscribed by Waugh on the front free endpaper: "Dear Charlie — with affectionate warm wishes, this new book of mine," signed Alec Waugh. A warmly inscribed first American edition in the scarce pictorial jacket, with the appeal of Alec Waugh in his own right and of the Waugh family name. Octavo. 342 pp. Publisher's green cloth in the color pictorial dust jacket (priced $2.00). Near fine in a very good dust jacket, with a small chip to the lower front edge, minor wear to the extremities, and light fading to the spine.

Alec Waugh — elder brother of Evelyn, son of the publisher Arthur Waugh of Chapman and Hall — made his name at nineteen with the controversial school novel The Loom of Youth (1917) and went on, across six decades, to produce some fifty books of fiction, travel, and biography. That American Woman belongs to a remarkably busy stretch, with several books published in 1932 alone. A witty, worldly novel about a young English writer who falls in love with the wife of a New York millionaire, its scenes move between New York, London, and Villefranche on the Côte d'Azur — the same circuit Waugh himself was travelling that year, as he later recalled in his memoir A Year to Remember: A Reminiscence of 1931.

SKU TO-2026-121