Cecil Beaton's Diaries 1922-1939; The Wandering Years, First Edition, 1961

Cecil Beaton's Diaries - The Wandering Years 1922-1939. Published by Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1961, First Edition, 387 pages. Illustrated with Beaton's own line drawings and photographs.Hardcover with pictorial dust jacket. Superb condition. Jacket protected in a Mylar cover.

Dust jacket reads, "Few franker autobiographical documents have seen the light of day. For almost as long as he has been able to write Cecil Beaton has been keeping his diaries. They have accumulated year after year, and from this now formidable pile of notebooks he has extracted the substance of a volume covering seventeen years. He does not attempt to present an idealized self-portrait: the reverse is the case. He reveals his youthful setbacks; his differences with his devoted but at times unsympathetic family; his doubts and his early failures-just as frankly and dispassionately as he depicts his later triumphs. He describes-and illustrated with his photographs-his friendships with famous men and women, artists, writers, actors and actresses, film stars and celebrated social figures. He also portrays the friends of his youth and childhood, his parents and relations, against the background of an ordinary English household from which emerged an extraordinarily gifted young man. Cecil Beaton seldom spares his contemporaries-many of his personal sketches are drawn in acid strokes-nor does he spare himself. The result is a fascinating and disarming book, one of the most unusual memoirs of our time."

Beautiful copy of this scarce book!