The Broken Root
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951.
First American edition. A nice association copy signed by Barea and warmly inscribed to Margaret Rink (Ilsa and Arturo's former housemate and good friend) in Spanish on the front free endpaper, "Para Margaret con un abraro de Arturo / Marro [sic] 1951." Her bookplate on paste down. [vi], 308 pp. Bound in publisher's green cloth blocked and lettered in silver at the spine. Very Good with lean to binding, damp staining at foot, moderate wear and light fraying to spine ends and corners. Newspaper clipping announcing the Faber publication of The Broken Root laid in at 146-147 pp resulting in offsetting. In a About Very Good unclipped dust jacket, chipped (including a small interior one in the rear panel), and a little dampstained. The Spanish author's first and only novel, a post-Civil War narrative about an exile returning to Francoist Spain. He fled the country in 1938 during the Civil War for France, then moved to England in 1939, where he worked for the BBC and wrote his famous autobiographical trilogy The Forging of a Rebel. Margaret Rink and Barea's wife Ilsa met in August 1939 when both were hired to work for German broadcasts at the BBC Monitoring Service at Evesham, Worcestershire. Ilsa, her Austrian refugee parents, Margaret, and Arturo Barea lived together for the next four years in a large rundown house called Brooklands in the village of Fladbury just outside of Birmingham.The couple remained good friends with Margaret all their lives.
Price: $1,250