8vo. Original cloth; publisher's unclipped dust jacket (rubbing). Provenance: Roul Tunley (1910-2007), American journalist (presentation inscription).

FIRST EDITION. PRESENTATION COPY, INSCRIBED BY PORTER TO ROUL TUNLEY, an editor at The Saturday Evening Post, "...after the battle of New York - the Survivor - with good wishes." Work on The Ship of Fools began in 1940 and was based on a journal Porter kept of a sea voyage from Mexico to Germany in 1931. Over the course of many years her original publisher would constantly announce the book's forthcoming publication, leading it to become one of the most eagerly anticipated novels of the mid-twentieth century.