Schell, Jonathan

THE TIME OF ILLUSION [Signed]

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, 392, xii pages. In Very Good minus condition with a Very Good condition dust jacket. Black spine with white and faded red lettering. Dust jacket is wrapped in a mylar cover, price uncut "$10.00", has light age toning to edges, creasing to top corner of the front flap, and light shelving wear. Boards have light bumping to spine ends, and minor discoloration to edges. Textblock has foxing to top edges. Inscribed "For Susan and Neil, With warm regards and highest admiration from Jonathan" and dated "January '76". Shelved in Room F.

1412875

Special Collections

Price: $250

NOTES

Inscribed by Jonathan Schell to Susan and Neil Sheehan, “With warm regards and highest admiration,” and dated January 1976, the year of publication. Schell was among the most significant American literary journalists to emerge from the Vietnam War-era. His early reporting for The New Yorker, especially “The Village of Ben Suc” and The Military Half, offered some of the most comprehensive and effective contemporary accounts of American military policy in Vietnam. The Time of Illusion, first published in serial form in The New Yorker in 1975, extended Schell’s Vietnam-era analysis into the Nixon years, tracing the connection between the war, executive secrecy, Watergate, and the erosion of public trust in governmental institutions. The association with Neil Sheehan is especially resonant: both writers helped shape the American understanding of Vietnam not simply as a military conflict but as a crisis public and political accountability. The inscription to Susan Sheehan links Schell to a fellow practitioner of long-form documentary journalism associated with The New Yorker. As an association copy, the book links three writers whose work helped define nonfiction literary culture of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly around the Vietnam War and political disillusionment during the Johnson and Nixon Administrations.

Second Story Books is honored to offer this item from the personal collection of Neil and Susan Sheehan. Neil Sheehan (1936–2021) and Susan Sheehan (born 1937) were a distinguished husband-and-wife team whose careers helped define American literary journalism in the second half of the twentieth century. Neil Sheehan, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for The New York Times, is best known for his role in bringing the Pentagon Papers to public attention and for his landmark book "A Bright Shining Lie", while Susan Sheehan built a parallel reputation as a leading voice at The New Yorker, crafting deeply reported narrative nonfiction on subjects ranging from mental health to social institutions, earning her own Pulitzer Prize in 1983. Their longstanding ties to major publications, particularly The New Yorker, placed them at the center of an influential cultural and intellectual network, and the books from their library carry added provenance through this close connection to the magazine’s editorial and artistic community.