Brian Howard. Portrait of a Failure

Edited by Marie-Jacqueline Lancaster. Introduction by Maurice Richardson.

Anthony Blond Ltd. London. 1968. First edition. Hardback; blue cloth-bound boards, dust jacket. xx, 639 pages. Hors-texte b&w plates. English. 235 x 160mm. 1.2kg. . Very good in good dust jacket; shelf wear to jacket, several small nicks, one 1cm tear to top edge of front jacket, laminate peeling in a couple of areas, yellowing to jacket, price-clipped; previous owner's mark excised from front free endpaper.

A scarce first edition of the biography of Brian Howard, one of the wittiest and most complex of the Bright Young Things. Howard was at Eton and Oxford; he was a poet, a practical joker and a magnificent party host. Evelyn Waugh may well have based his character of Anthony Blanche on him. Sadly he never achieved success with his poetry and his life ended with suicide in 1958. The biography includes reprints of several of Howard's poems.