Lady L. by Romain GARY (First American edition)
GARY, Romain. Lady L. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1958.
First American edition. Author’s first novel written directly in English. A smart copy in the strikingly stylish dust jacket by American artist Gray Foy.
Romain Gary (1914-1980, born Roman Kacew), was a French writer-diplomat, born in Lithuania, brought up in Warsaw and Nice. During the war Gary was a Free French airman, one of only five of the Free French Air Force Squadron’s original 113 volunteers to have survived the conflict. His first book – Education europeeanne (1945) was among France’s foremost bestsellers, and it became ‘the novel of the Resistance’. In 1945 Gary married the English writer Lesley Blanch (1904-2007), and commenced his work as a diplomat, serving in Bulgaria, Switzerland, and at the United Nations.
In the late 1950s Gary was appointed consul general for France to Los Angeles, where he wrote Lady L., a Pygmalion-like transformation of a beautiful prostitute into an elegant aristocrat, trained to infiltrate circles of money and power by her anarchist lover. In 1965 Lady L. was made into a film, produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, directed by Peter Ustinov, and starring Sophia Loren, Paul Newman and David Niven.
8vo, qtr cloth. Owner’s name to front endpaper. Very good in very good plus dust jacket (spine slightly browned).