Death, Sleep, and the Traveler, John Hawkes. First Edition.

John Hawkes (1925-1988) was an American postmodernist writer, known for the intensity of his work and unconventional, experimental style. He was educated at Harvard, and although he published his first novel in 1949, it was his second, The Lime Twig, that won him acclaim and the granddaddy of postmodern lit, Thomas Pynchon, was said to be a great admirer of it. He went on to have a distinguished career, penning over a dozen novels and winning prestigious awards. In 1996, The New York Times called him a figure ''in a post-modern pantheon of experimental novelists who include John Barth, William Gass and William Gaddis,'' and Gaddis himself stated that Hawkes's ''sentences are themselves 'events.' ''

Death, Sleep, and the Traveler, published in 1974, was Hawkes' eleventh published work. The plot revolves around a middle-aged Dutchman, his dissolving marriage, his involvement in two sexual triangles, his obsession with the murder he is accused of having committed on a pleasure cruise. “It is an exceptionally concise and beautiful work,” writes the novelist-critic Jonathan Baumbach, “delicate, erotic, dreamlike―in all, a luminous novel by the richest prose stylist in American letters since Faulkner.” This is the first printing, which includes a review slip sent to writer George Plimpton: