Four Quartets by Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns) - 1943

New York: Harcourt Brace and Company. Very Good in Good+ dust jacket. 1943. First American Edition; First Printing. Hardcover. 0151330530 . Copyright 1943 with Black cloth boards, spine lettered in gilt (faded). First printing of the first edition, first issue, with the First American Edition statement listed on the copyright page. 1 of 788 copies by publisher; in the first state dust jacket with heavy block letters to 9 titles listed on rear panel through listing of "Old Possum's Book." Back inside flap of dust blank and the publisher's original price of $2.00 listed in the upper corner of the inside front flap [Gallup A43a]. Tthere is a 1/8 inch x 2 1/2 inch tear at top edge of dust and two very minor chips. Dust Jacket is torn in fold about 3/4s of the way from top but dust now in Mylar Protective Cover.(see photo Black cloth boards have some slight discoloration spots and board corners are slightly dented with very light wear to covers. Has the signature of a former owner Evelyn V. Estes on front endpaper with clean contents having no writing, underlining or highlighting, binding is tight. Some tanning to endpapers. Contents page of Eliot's wartime masterpiece includes four works Burt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, Litle Gidding together in one book that formerly had been published separately. East Coker is the village in Somerset from which Eliot's ancestors departed for the New World in 1669; Burnt Norton refers to the Gloucestershire manor house erected on the foundation of a house that burned to the ground in the seventeenth century; The Dry Salvages is a group of rocks off Cape Ann, and so harks to the poet's New England roots, and Little Gidding was the manor in Huntingdonshire that was the destination of poets' pilgrimages as the site where Nicholas Ferrar founded an Anglican religious community in the mid-seventeenth century. Dust Jacket is torn in fold about 3/4s of the way but now in Mylar Protective Cover. A very good collector's grade item. It is the last major verse written by Nobel laureate T. S. Eliot, considered by Eliot himself to be his finest work. Rare. ; 8.70 X 5.60 X 0.40 inches; 39 pages .