Mary and the Giant
First British edition, 1988
Mary and the Giant is an early non-science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick, written between 1953 and 1955 and set in small-town California. Unpublished during his lifetime, it appeared posthumously in 1987. This is the first British edition, published by Victor Gollancz the following year.
Hardcover. First British Edition, First Printing. Octavo, black cloth with gilt lettering on spine. London: Victor Gollancz, 1988. Wintz & Hyde MS5.4. ISBN: 0575042435. #11297.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Hardcover. First British Edition, First Printing. Octavo, black cloth with gilt lettering on spine. London: Victor Gollancz, 1988. Wintz & Hyde MS5.4. ISBN: 0575042435. #11297.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Additional Details
Mary and the Giant was written between 1953 and 1955, set in small-town California in the same period, and is one of the more revealing of Dick's mainstream novels. Joseph Schilling is a large, prosperous man in his late fifties who drives through California towns looking for a place to open a record shop, accompanied by his driver Max. The novel's opening pages establish Schilling's habit of predatory attention toward young women.
Schilling settles in Pacific Park and opens his shop. Mary Anne Reynolds, nineteen, answers his help-wanted advertisement and almost immediately leaves after an unwanted physical advance. She falls into the orbit of Carleton Tweaney, a Black lounge singer who becomes a friend and sometime lover, and through him is introduced to the jazz social world of Pacific Park's Black community, which she finds more honest and livable than the white world she comes from. Danny Coombes, Schilling's assistant, discovers that his wife Beth is sleeping with Schilling. In a jealous rage directed not at Schilling but instead at Carleton, whom he blames more broadly for the world and situation he finds himself in, Danny tries to shoot Carleton, but ends up killed instead. Eventually, Mary Anne returns to work for Schilling, entering a complicated relationship with no illusions about who he is.
Dick described the novel as a modern variation on Mozart's Don Giovanni, with Schilling as the aging seducer eventually undone by a young woman. The comparison is apt structurally, but the novel's texture is more sociological than operatic. Dick is closely observant of class, race, and the particular dynamics of men who use money and authority as instruments of intimacy. The Black characters in the novel are written with more dignity and feeling than was common in American fiction of the 1950s, and Mary Anne's gravitating toward that community rather than away from it is significant for the time period.
Like Dick's other mainstream novels, Mary and the Giant was rejected by publishers during his lifetime and appeared posthumously. First published in 1987 by Arbor House, with a simultaneous limited edition of fifty copies by Ultramarine Press.
Schilling settles in Pacific Park and opens his shop. Mary Anne Reynolds, nineteen, answers his help-wanted advertisement and almost immediately leaves after an unwanted physical advance. She falls into the orbit of Carleton Tweaney, a Black lounge singer who becomes a friend and sometime lover, and through him is introduced to the jazz social world of Pacific Park's Black community, which she finds more honest and livable than the white world she comes from. Danny Coombes, Schilling's assistant, discovers that his wife Beth is sleeping with Schilling. In a jealous rage directed not at Schilling but instead at Carleton, whom he blames more broadly for the world and situation he finds himself in, Danny tries to shoot Carleton, but ends up killed instead. Eventually, Mary Anne returns to work for Schilling, entering a complicated relationship with no illusions about who he is.
Dick described the novel as a modern variation on Mozart's Don Giovanni, with Schilling as the aging seducer eventually undone by a young woman. The comparison is apt structurally, but the novel's texture is more sociological than operatic. Dick is closely observant of class, race, and the particular dynamics of men who use money and authority as instruments of intimacy. The Black characters in the novel are written with more dignity and feeling than was common in American fiction of the 1950s, and Mary Anne's gravitating toward that community rather than away from it is significant for the time period.
Like Dick's other mainstream novels, Mary and the Giant was rejected by publishers during his lifetime and appeared posthumously. First published in 1987 by Arbor House, with a simultaneous limited edition of fifty copies by Ultramarine Press.
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