A collector's edition of a work first published in Paris by Olympia Press in 1958 under the pseudonym Maxwell Kenton. 

Candy turns Voltaire’s Candide into a filthy mid-century American picaresque. Its relentlessly innocent heroine, Candy Christian, moves through a procession of professors, doctors, artists, mystics and assorted predators, each disguising appetite as education, therapy, spirituality or sophistication. The joke is less that Candy is sexually liberated than that every institution she encounters has found an elaborate vocabulary for exploitation.

Written by Southern and Hoffenberg partly for quick money, the novel became an international bestseller, a censorship target and eventually a countercultural cult book. Its sexual politics have aged badly in places—the heroine’s passivity is both the mechanism of the satire and its substantial limitation—but the manic dialogue, grotesque characters and attack on intellectual hypocrisy still carry Southern’s particular acid fizz. Best for readers of Olympia Press, transgressive comic fiction and 1960s satire who do not require their dirty jokes to have behaved impeccably in the intervening decades. 

1994 Book-of-the-Month Club edition, created by arrangement with Sterling Lord Literistic. Paperback with Richard Merkin cover illustration. Very good condition with light edge wear and minor rubbing.