Eleuthéria

New York: Foxrock, Inc., 1995 Translated by Michael Brodsky. First limited edition. One of 250 copies signed by co-publishers Barney Rosset, Dan Simon, and John G. H. Oakes, this being number 163. Publisher’s blue cloth, with front board and spine stamped in gilt. About fine, with just a touch of creasing to head of spine and very light toning to foot of spine. With laid-in National Arts Club program detailing a dinner reception for the book. Overall, a lovely copy. From the personal library of Mel Gussow, an important American theater critic and close friend of Beckett’s. Eleuthéria was Beckett’s first completed play, written in French in 1947. Director Roger Blin chose to stage Waiting for Godot over Eleuthéria in 1953, and Eleuthéria languished for 40 years until Beckett gave the manuscript to friend and longtime American publisher Barney Rosset. After Beckett’s death in 1989, Rosset set out to publish the play in English. Despite pushback from Beckett’s literary executor, Jérôme Lindon, Rosset published this American translation of the play in 1995. In Mel Gussow’s New York Times review of the play, he writes, “[Eleuthéria’s] value rests partly on the fact that it presages his subsequent plays, in particular ‘Waiting for Godot’ and ‘Krapp's Last Tape.’ However, as a bourgeois comedy with a darkly sardonic heart, it has its own authority and impudent wit.” Mel Gussow (1933 - 2005) was an American theater and movie critic who contributed more than 4,000 articles and reviews to the New York Times over a span of 35 years. Gussow first met Beckett in 1978, and the two continued to meet and converse informally on life and art about once a year for the next 10 years until Beckett’s death in 1989 (their final meeting was at Beckett’s French nursing home where he later passed away). Gussow drew from these meetings to write his book, Conversations with and about Beckett (1996) - one in a series of four “Conversation” books, the others featuring conversations with playwrights Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter, and Tom Stoppard. Gussow’s Beckett book is particularly illuminating given that the enigmatic playwright famously declined to do interviews for most of his lifetime. Gussow also wrote Beckett’s NYT obituary in 1989, titled "Samuel Beckett is Dead at 83; His ‘Godot’ Changed Theater.". Singed By Publisher. First Limited Edition. Hard Cover. Near Fine.