The Happy Birthday of Death (1960) Signed First Edition Reference
The Happy Birthday of Death was published by New Directions in 1960 and contains Corso’s two most famous poems: “Marriage” and “Bomb.” These are among the finest individual poems produced by the Beat Generation — “Marriage” is a hilarious, anguished meditation on domesticity, and “Bomb” is a shaped poem (printed as a mushroom cloud) that addresses nuclear annihilation with a mixture of horror and ecstatic celebration that remains genuinely unsettling.
The Poems
“Marriage” begins with a question — “Should I get married? Should I be good?” — and spirals through fantasies of suburban respectability, parental disapproval, honeymoon disaster, and the suffocating conventions of American domesticity. The poem is Corso at his sharpest: funny, anarchic, tender, and finally sad. It has been anthologized more than any other Beat poem besides “Howl.”
“Bomb” takes the form of a visual poem arranged on the page in the shape of a mushroom cloud. The poem’s strategy — addressing the bomb as a lover, a god, a friend — is deliberately provocative, rejecting the pieties of anti-nuclear protest poetry in favor of a surrealist embrace that is more disturbing than any straightforward denunciation.
First Edition Identification
Publisher: New Directions, New York Publication date: 1960 Format: Hardcover in dust jacket; also issued simultaneously in paperback Note: “Bomb” is printed as a foldout page to preserve its visual layout
Signed Copy Market Values
- Signed first edition, hardcover, fine/fine: $400–$1,200
- Inscribed copies: $600–$2,000
- Signed paperback edition: $100–$300
- Unsigned first edition, hardcover: $75–$200
The presence of “Marriage” and “Bomb” — two genuine classics of postwar American poetry — makes this the most important single Corso volume. The foldout “Bomb” page is vulnerable to damage and often found detached or torn, which makes copies with the foldout intact more valuable.