Love Went A-Riding: [A Novel] Richard Blaker First World War

Covers a little marked, edges a little spotted. With the marginal pencillings and numerous manuscript notes on the prelims of Hugh Cecil, who devotes a chapter of his book The Flower of Battle: British fiction writers of the First World War (1995) to Richard Blaker (1893-1940) - author of the Great War classic Medal Without Bar (1930). Sales of Love Went a-Riding, his last novel (published in the US under its original title On Pegasus He Rode), disappointed the author. "The main character," writes Cecil, "was a dashing forty-year-old ex-artillery officer with a glorious war career and a leftover life to kill. Blaker drew Kenneth Creswell (not unlike an older version of Kenneth Chacey, in Oliver Onions' Peace in Our Time [1923]) as one of 'the generation of the brokenhearted', who found it impossible to engage with anyone at a serious emotional level, and went on occasional, terrifying alcoholic jags - drawn from Blaker's personal experience at the time. The book was an excellent realistic study of alcoholism and its consequences."