RABBIT RUN. Signed by the author

First Edition: 307, (ii) pages, original quarter green cloth and blue-grey boards, signed by the author on the title page, a very good copy in the dust jacket which shows minor fading of the spine, light wear along the edges and a two centimetre closed tear at the bottom of the back panel.

"Rabbit, Run was meant to be a realistic demonstration of what happens when a young American family man goes on the road – the people left behind get hurt. There was no painless dropping out of the Fifties' fraying but still tight social weave. Arriving at so prim a moral was surely not my only intention: the book ends on an ecstatic, open note that was meant to stay open, as testimony to our heart's stubborn amoral quest for something once called grace." This passage comes from Updike's Introduction to Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy (Everyman's Library), published in 1995. In this introduction, Updike looked back at his career-defining character and explained that he wrote the first book partly as a "realistic" rebuttal to Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957). While Kerouac celebrated the freedom of the road, Updike wanted to show the "hurt" and the "social weave" that such a flight leaves in its wake.