The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler (The Modern Library)

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good, Dust Jacket: c.e 1920s Fair/Good-. Random House (The Modern Library). Ex Libris.

Bookplate on back of front cover. Two previous owners names on title page. Dust Jacket is in good condition, but has several tears to front and back.

Written between 1873 and 1884 but not published until 1903, a year after Butler’s death, his marvelously uninhibited satire savages Victorian bourgeois values as personified by multiple generations of the Pontifex family. A thinly veiled account of his own upbringing in the bosom of a God-fearing Christian family, Butler’s scathingly funny depiction of the self-righteous hypocrisy underlying nineteenth-century domestic life was hailed by George Bernard Shaw as “one of the summits of human achievement.”