Dante Alighieri - The Divine Comedy - 1978

Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy – Easton Press – 1978 - 100 Greatest Books Ever Written Series

Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) was born in Florence into a family of minor nobility and spent much of his adult life in political exile, dying in Ravenna without returning to his city. The work he began around 1300 and completed shortly before his death stands as one of the defining achievements of Western literature — an account of a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise that is at once a theological vision, a political document, and a deeply personal poem. Written in Dante's native Tuscan dialect rather than Latin, it played a formative role in establishing Italian as a literary language.

The Divine Comedy is structured across three canticles — Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso — each divided into thirty-three cantos, with an introductory canto bringing the total to one hundred. The poem follows the narrator through the realms of the afterlife, guided first by the Roman poet Virgil and then by Beatrice, the idealized figure whose memory Dante had carried since childhood. The translation presented here is the annotated English verse rendering by Melville Best Anderson, with notes and elucidations by the translator and an introduction by Arthur Livingston.

The thirty-two drawings reproduced throughout are the work of William Blake, produced in the final years of his life. Executed in pencil and watercolour, they remain among the most celebrated visual responses to the poem in any medium.

Full genuine leather binding in deep red
Front cover with all-over dense gold-stamped arabesque and floral design
Spine with raised bands and ornate gold floral panels
Gilt page edges
Silk ribbon marker in red
Frontispiece portrait of Dante Alighieri, specially commissioned for this edition
Printed and bound in the United States of America

Condition is Very Good. The red leather binding is clean and well preserved with no cracking or fading. The gilt page edges are bright with only light surface marks. The ribbon marker is intact. The interior pages are clean throughout, with no annotations. A well-maintained collector's copy.

Ships from Germany. Carefully packed in cardboard book mailer with protective wrapping.