LITTLE FRIEND, LITTLE FRIEND with his most famous poem in his hand de JARRELL, Randall - 1945

New York: Dial Press, 1945. First Edition. Hardcover. Slight uneven sunning to the boards from the missing sections of the dustwrapper. Near Fine in a Fair dustwrapper lacking most of the spine and with a few small tears and chips. His second book published in an edition of 2000 copies. INSCRIBED on the front free endpaper for Dorothea Garritson and SIGNED by the poet below Jarrell's handwritten poem, the last poem of the book and perhaps his best known, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," with its famous last line: "When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose."

In his review of this book Robert Lowell said it "contains some of the best poems on modern war, better, I think, and far more professional than those of Wilfred Owen, which, though they seem pathetically eternal to us now, are sometimes amateurish and unfinished. The determined, passive, sacrificial lives of the pilots, inwardly so harmless and outwardly so destructive, are ideal subjects for Jarrell" ("With Wild Dogmatism," NEW YORK TIMES, 7 October 1951).