The Broom of the System, David Foster Wallace. First Edition.
David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) was an acclaimed American writer, and one of my favorites. The Lost Angeles Times called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years" and he's influenced an entire generation of writers. In fact, it's hard to find someone that reads lit who hasn't heard of Wallace. He won a host of awards, including the coveted MacArthur Genius Grant. His work his at turns hilarious, depressing, prophetic and dense AF.
His first book, The Broom of the System, was Wallace's first novel, published in 1987 when he was just 25 years old. Wallace submitted the novel as one of two undergraduate honors theses at Amherst College, the other being a paper on Richard Taylor's fatalism. After the novel's submission, Wallace decided to devote his career to writing fiction. This is the scarce hardcover first printing: