?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 18,000 - $ 25,000
ASSOCIATION COPY WITH 'PIGASUS' DRAWING STEINBECK, JOHN. The Grapes of Wrath. 8vo, publisher's pictorial tan cloth, covers clean with virtually no rubbing or wear; outer pastedown edges with faint evidence of binder's glue as usual, though with no offsetting to facing endpapers; first state dust jacket, mild rubbing to folds, small skillful restorations to spine panel tips and flap folds, bright and clean, a superb example with the original $2.75 price present. New York: Viking, (1939)
first edition, an excellent association copy, inscribed on the front free endpaper "For Jules and Joyce and also Joan [underlined] with love John Steinbeck." Below his signature Steinbeck added his "Pigasus" drawing. Jules Buck was a movie producer; he and Steinbeck made an early attempt toward a collaborative screenplay for what would become Elia Kazan's "Viva Zapata," though Steinbeck's contribution was such that he received sole credit. Buck produced such post-war film classics as Robert Siodmak's The Killers (based on the story by Ernest Hemingway), and Jules Dassin's The Naked City. His wife Joyce Gates was an actress and their daughter Joan became the editor of French Vogue. Steinbeck generally reserved his flying pig doodle for close friends or significant occasions. In a letter (March, 1983) Elaine Steinbeck explained the significance of the image: "The Pigasus symbol came from my husband's fertile, joyful, and often wild imagination ... John would never have been so presumptuous as to use the winged horse as his symbol; the little pig said that man must try to attain the heavens though his equipment be meager. Man must aspire though he be earthbound" (The Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies). An excellent inscribed copy with a fine association. Goldstone & Payne A12.a.
