The Graduate
"For God's sake, Mrs. Robinson. Here we are. You've got me in your house. You put on music. You gave me a drink. We've both been drinking already. Now you start opening up your personal life to me and tell me your husband won't be home for hours."
"So?"
"Mrs. Robinson," he said, turning around, "you are trying to seduce me."
FIRST EDITION of Charles Webb's first novel, the basis for the classic film.
"There are few characters in postwar fiction as disappointed as Benjamin. A brilliant and successful student with 'everything', as they say, ahead of him, one day in the early 1960s he returns home from college to find that nothing has meaning for him; he no longer wants what he is supposed to want. Who, in those changing times, should he become when his only desire is to flounder in his father's swimming pool on a rubber ring? But Benjamin is not entirely good for nothing. It is his good luck that someone does sense his dissatisfaction, and does want him. This is the wife of his father's business partner, the fabulous Mrs Robinson, who has been observing him closely..." (Hanif Kureishi, The Guardian).
In Benjamin Braddock, Mr Webb "has created a character whose blunders and follies just might become as widely discussed as those of J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield" (Orville Prescott, The New York Times, 1963).
New York: New American Library, 1963. Octavo, original half-cloth, original dust jacket. Book fine, dust jacket with a few tiny spots of rubbing to front panel. An outstanding copy, rare in this condition.
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