FIRST EDITION, The Hard Blue Sky, Shirley Ann Grau, First Printing, 1958

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958. NF/VG-. Stated First Edition. The book is tight with solid hinges, good tips, and clean unmarred boards. The textblock is clean with no writing, bookplate, or markings and not BCE, ex-library, or remaindered. The dust jacket is unclipped ($5.00) with chipping to the spine and corners and lightly sunned spine (see photos). Protected in a new Brodart Mylar cover. 466 pages. 6 x 8½" tall.

West of New Orleans among a few small Gulf islands lies the Isle aux Chiens, a tiny, impoverished strip of land burdened by intolerable heat and roaming packs of wild dogs. Here a handful of Creole families eke out a meager existence by fishing the Gulf waters. Such is the fate of Al Landry and his seventeen-year-old daughter, Annie.

The Hard Blue Sky is Grau’s debut novel, establishing her as a chronicler of bayou life and the complexities of the Deep South’s most impoverished corners. Winner of the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for her novel “The Keepers of the House.”