First edition. Original red cloth in dustwrapper. Author's presentation copy inscribed to Evelyn Waugh on the front endpaper, "To Evelyn with so many thanks for Love Among the Ruins, affectionately, Graham." Waugh's bookplate to front pastedown. A very good copy with a touch of fading to the spine in (supplied) dustwrapper, which is worn with shallow chipping to the head of the spine and a couple of closed tears.

A monumental association copy, linking the two great Catholic writers of the twentieth century.
Waugh and Greene were contemporaries at Oxford though not friends at the time. They began a long friendship and series of correspondence in the mid thirties. Both were famous converts to Catholicism, though differed greatly in their interpretation of their religion. Politically they also differed as Greene was a staunch socialist and Waugh maintained a right wing leaning. Despite numerous arguments they maintained a deep friendship born from a mutual respect of each others work.
"When I come to die, I shall wish he [Waugh] were beside me, for he would give me no easy comfort. Our politics were a hundred miles apart and he regarded my Catholicism as heretical. What indeed had made us friends? He wrote to me in October 1952, 'I am just completing my forty-ninth year. You are just beginning yours. It is the grand climacteric which sets the course of the rest of one's life, I am told. It has been a year of lost friends for me. Not by death but by wear and tear. Our friendship started rather late. Pray God it lasts.' It did."
The bulk of Evelyn Waugh's library was bought en bloc by the Ransom Centre at the University of Texas at Austin. As a consequence books from Waugh's library, particularly with such a significant association, are very seldom found in commerce.

Stock ID: 33710