New York, NY: Dial Press (1951)

First Edition. Signed Letter Laid In.

Very good in price clipped dust jacket with edge wear and a water stain to the top right front corner of dust jacket. Water stain continues on corners of first 100 pages of book.

A signed personal letter from Foote, dated 17 Nov 1990 ("my seventy-fourth birthday"), detailing the violence of jumping-jacks exercises.

ABOUT LOVE IN A DRY SEASON

Shelby Foote’s magnificently orchestrated novel anticipates much of the subject matter of his monumental Civil War trilogy, rendering the clash between North and South with a violence all the more shocking for its intimacy.

Love in a Dry Season describes an erotic and economic triangle, in which two wealthy and fantastically unhappy Mississippi families, the Barcrofts and the Carrutherses, are joined by an open-faced fortune hunter from the North, a man whose ruthlessness is matched only by his inability to understand the people he tries to exploit and his fatal incomprehension of the passions he so casually ignites.

Combining a flawless sense of place with a Faulknerian command of the grotesque, Foote’s novel turns a small cotton town into a sexual battleground as fatal as Vicksburg or Shiloh, and one where strategy is no match for instinct and tradition.