Johnny Pye & The Fool-Killer

New York : Farrar & Rinehart, 1938. Edition unlcear; assumedly not a first. Octavo in green boards; dust jacket; deckle edge to textblock; 78pp: illustrations (b&w); 21 cm Near fine in very good(+) dust jacket; boards clean; light toning to paste-down endpaper; pages clean; binding tight; dust jacket shows miniscule tearing to front and back edges; jacket is protected in archival myllar. Hardcover.

Uncommon. A modern American fable that reworks frontier folklore into a moral allegory about responsibility, power, and the education of conscience. Johnny Pye, a clever but morally unformed boy, accidentally acquires the services of the Fool-Killer, an ancient, relentless figure whose task is to destroy fools wherever they are found. At first Johnny delights in the Fool-Killer’s efficiency, using him to punish obvious stupidity and petty injustice, but he soon discovers that folly is inseparable from ordinary human weakness, error, and even hope. As the Fool-Killer’s logic proves pitiless and expands beyond Johnny’s intentions, the boy is forced into a painful moral reckoning: to mature, he must accept that the world cannot be purified by extermination, and that wisdom lies not in killing folly but in living with its risks. Benét’s tale moves lightly but insistently from comic fantasy to ethical parable, ending with Johnny’s hard-won recognition that mercy and restraint, not righteous violence, are the true marks of adulthood.