The Tower is Down ~ Thomas Livingston 1966 First Edition Signed/double inscribed ~ Beat Generation Novel

Title: The Tower is Down
Author: Thomas Livingston
Publication: London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966

Description: First Edition. Double inscribed by Livingston on the dedication page, first to his mother in 1966, and then to his daughter in 2001. Blue cloth boards with gilt lettering on spine. A bit spine cocked. Light soiling on copyright page, else clean. Dust jacket art by Quentin Blake. Dust jacket is chipped, with loss at tail of spine and showing general heavy edge wear; not price clipped; in an archival mylar sleeve. Jacket art by Quentin Blake. 304 pages.

The second novel by American ex-pat Beat writer Thomas Livingston (b. 1935), which begins with the inclusion of an epigraph by his friend, the Beat poet Harold Norse. Livingston, a native of Scarsdale in Westchester County, New York, attended Williams College and graduated from Stanford in 1958. He then lived and worked in Big Sur and Laguna Beach. In 1961, he moved to Europe and met Harold Norse at the Beat Hotel, the beginning of their decades-long friendship.

Livingston, who was living in Paris at the time, inscribed the dedication page to his remarried mother, Emily Celeste (Mathias) Beard: ''For Emmy - / Le prochain, ma chere, / sera pour toi - / With much and special love / Tommy / 18 September 1966 / New Brunswick''. [The front free endpaper has the handwritten note "This book belongs to Emmy M. Beard".] Following his mother's death in 2001, he reinscribed it to his daughter Tracy in Carmel Valley.

Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Very Good
Jacket Condition: Good minus

Keywords: Beat poets, Beat writers, Beat movement, Harold Norse,