World Enough and Time by Robert Penn Warren. Random House, 1950. Apparent First edition. Hardcover in price clipped dust jacket. The jacket has moderate wear, a couple of tears, and chunks out of both the front and back covers (by the time the high bidder gets the book the jacket will be protected by Mylar). The book itself is a solid VG.

Robert Penn Warren's World Enough and Time is the kind of book that you set in front of a warm fire on a cold winter night with a mug of coffee and read. This novel has everything it needs to be considered an American classic. Based on the true story of Jereboam and Anna Beauchamp, this novel follows a story of passion and obsession and jealousy that occurred in Kentucky in the early 1800s.

In the admixture of wilderness and elegant society that was 1826 Kentucky, Jeremiah Beaumont, a brilliant, imaginative lawyer, stood trial for murdering his benefactor and father figure, the politician Colonel Cassius Fort. Now all the documents are in hand to reconstruct Beaumont's life story - his crime, his trial, his ultimate sin and punishment - and the historian-narrator of World Enough and Time sets about doing just that. He uncovers a burning idealist's search for purpose and his rabid rejection, like other great Promethean heroes of the American mythology, of conventional heroism. Based on the famous murder case known as the Kentucky Tragedy, World Enough in Time is, like its precursor All the King's Men, a fictional wonder that personifies history, philosophy, politics, and passion.