In the Suicide Mountains; Illustrated by Joe Servello

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977. First Edition, First Printing. Cloth and boards. Very Fine/Very Fine. Joe Servello. Square 8vo (8 1/2" H x 7 7/8" W), gray quarter cloth with light gold lettering over pale gray-blue boards, Mylar protected colorful pictorial dust jacket (unclipped) illustrating a crowded procession drawn by Joe Servello, who has repeated the illustration in B&W as the frontispiece plus drawings as capitals & ~ 20 full page drawings (one being a double-spread dragon), pictorial endpapers by Servello, publisher's maroon dust protective stain on top of pages, [xii] + 155 numbered & deckled pages + [156-58] + [159] Illustration. SUPERIOR CONDITION: tight, bright, clean with a small red remainder stamp on the lower edge of the pages. John Gardner (1933 - 1982) was an American novelist, essayist, literary critic and university professor. He is best known for his 1971 novel Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf myth from the monster's point of view. A tour de force! Gardner's best-known novels include The Sunlight Dialogues, about a disaffected policeman asked to engage a madman fluent in classical mythology; Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf legend from the monster's point of view, with an existential subtext; and October Light, about an embittered brother and sister living and feuding with each other in rural Vermont (the novel includes an invented "trashy novel" the woman reads). This last book won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976. Gardner was killed in a motorcycle accident on September 14, 1982--Wikipedia abridged.