BRITISH MODERNISM — Returning from War

Green, Henry (1905–1973) [Henry Vincent Yorke]

Back [Post-War English Modernism]

New York: The Viking Press, 1950. First American Edition. A man returns from war to find everything the same — and everything altered.

Henry Green transforms a conventional return-from-war narrative into something psychologically fragmented, restrained, and quietly unsettling — a novel concerned less with action than with emotional aftershocks.

Contemporary praise from Brendan Gill, Christopher Isherwood, and Charles Poore situates Green among the major English stylists of the mid-century period. The novel follows Loving in Green’s sequence of fiction and had not previously appeared in America before this Viking edition.

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: Green textured cloth with red-orange spine and front titles. Octavo; 8 inches tall. Pages 3–247. Original dust jacket present. Viking Press imprint, 1950. Jacket rear panel with contemporary reviews of Loving and Nothing.

CONDITION: Very Good / Good . Bindings are tight and square. Text is clean; light, even age-toning.
Moderate shelf handling wear. Dust jacket is price-clipped with a sunned spine, light spine-tip wear, and a fold to the upper front panel. Several small pencil reading notes and corresponding marginal ticks appear in the text, likely in the hand of publisher Ben Raeburn, from whose estate the volume originated. A solid and attractive copy with meaningful literary provenance interest.

This copy is from the estate of Horizon Press publisher Ben Raeburn and retains several small pencil reading notes on the rear endpage with corresponding marginal ticks, likely in Raeburn’s hand. The annotations are restrained and editorial in character rather than intrusive, adding subtle literary association interest without overwhelming the text.

HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE —
Henry Green, the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke, became one of the most admired yet elusive English novelists of the twentieth century. Writers including W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood praised his compressed dialogue and psychologically indirect style. Back, first published in England in 1946, stands among the earliest important English novels to examine the emotional dislocation of returning prisoners of war.

Through fragmented dialogue and emotional restraint, Green presents post-war England as a landscape of absence, altered relationships, and uncertainty. Charley Summers’ attempt to reconnect the living with the dead creates a novel both intimate and dreamlike, now regarded as one of Green’s finest post-war works.

SUBJECTS: Henry Green, British Modernism, Post-War England, Prisoners of War, Psychological Fiction, Viking Press, Twentieth-Century Fiction, Literary Association Copies, Ben Raeburn Provenance, English Literature, British Literature, Modernism, Post-War Fiction, Literary Fiction

Item #21994

Price: $35.00