PULITZER PRIZE WINNERS in LETTERS © by Larry James
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PULITZER PRIZE WINNERS IN LETTERS © by Larry James Gianakos Fiction 1917 no award *1918 Ernest Poole, His Family (Macmillan Co.; 320 pgs.; bound in blue cloth boards, gilt stamped on front cover and spine; full [embracing front panel, spine, and back panel] jacket illustration depicting New York City buildings by E. C.Caswell); published May 16, 1917; $1.50; three copies, two with the stunning dust jacket, now almost exotic in its rarity, with the front flap reading: “Just as THE HARBOR was the story of a constantly changing life out upon the fringe of the city, along its wharves, among its ships, so the story of Roger Gale’s family pictures the growth of a generation out of the embers of the old in the ceaselessly changing heart of New York. How Roger’s three daughters grew into the maturity of their several lives, each one so different, Mr. Poole tells with strong and compelling beauty, touching with deep, whole-hearted conviction some of the most vital problems of our modern way of living!the home, motherhood, children, the school; all of them seen through the realization, which Roger’s dying wife made clear to him, that whatever life may bring, ‘we will live on in our children’s lives.’ The old Gale house down-town is a little fragment of a past generation existing somehow beneath the towering apartments and office-buildings of the altered city. Roger will be remembered when other figures in modern literature have been forgotten, gazing out of his window at the lights of some near-by dwelling lifting high above his home, thinking of his children!Edith, wrapped up in her little household, Deborah living in her larger family, and Laura living with her beauty and her quest for happiness, all three of them lives that he will leave behind him on this earth!his immortality.” ; back flap describes the author’s earlier novel, the 1915 The Harbor ; review copies in lighter blue boards noted publication date May 16, 1917; on the website First Edition Points at http://www.fedpo.com/BookDetail.php/His-Family, Gianakos is quoted, commenting upon the extraordinary significance of the now very coveted but seldom found wraparound dust wrapper: “ ‘His Family’'s dust wrapper remains, aside from the obvious ‘Gone With the Wind,’‘The Grapes of Wrath,’‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’‘ A Confederacy of Dunces,’and ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,’ as the most evocative and stunning of all Pulitzer Prize fiction winners. It was designed by E. C. Caswell, whose expressive art work graced the wrappers and included illustrations for many key literary works early in the twentieth century ( Edith Wharton among them). Here Caswell depicts the home of protagonist, the widower Roger Gale, whose relationship with his diverse and conflicted three adult daughters forms the nucleus of the story. It is dwarfed by the surrounding tall office buildings and tenement dwellings constituting the Manhattan skyline. It is a full wraparound illustration, and the buildings are gently washed away as the eye proceeds downward toward their foundations. This too is surely by design, indicating that not merely is the Gale home and its nineteenth-century roots vanishing, but so is the way of life of that past century, as the new and quintessentially modern becomes more defined as it relentlessly moves upward, higher toward the sky. This is why Caswell's building images become more defined as they follow upward, and why indeed those building images vanish entirely as the eye follows down toward their former foundations. Indeed, this wrapper may well have been Caswell's masterpiece. It is therefore not merely highly collectible as the first wrapper to grace a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, but as a work of great art in and of itself. Someday soon, this book in proper first printing and with its original wrapper, may rival in value other outstanding works in their first printed and entire form, by writers much more seminal than Ernest Poole . I foresee a time within the next decade that a first printing and original wrapper copy of HIS FAMILY becomes almost as prized as the very best of Wharton, Cather, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck." Mr. Gianakos is now partnered with his lifelong friend and attorney Robert P. Safos to bring their collection into national institutionalization and to create a national philanthropic foundation . *1919 Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons (illustrated by Arthur William Brown; Doubleday, Page & Co.; 516 pgs.; bound in cloth boards; top edge light brown; $1.40 [price indicated on dust jacket side panel]; dust jacket blue front panel, lettered in white, features young couple in a drawing room as seen through a paneled window; rear panel, reflecting wartime enlistment and service propaganda, reads “I Wish I Was Old Enough to Fight,” and follows “Do you know what ‘Retreat’ is in the Army? I always thought it was something about running away, not getting licked or something. Only I know our boys don’t run away, and I often wondered about it. Then last fall, Mother and Dad and I were at an Army Camp where my brother is a First-class Private, he’s only nineteen and he enlisted when war was declared. Well, we were visiting him one evening and the bugle blew and the boys all ‘Presented Arms,’ and the sun was just setting and it seemed awful kind of quiet, like a noise had stipped when the sun went down. And the Colonel and his staff were standing there when ‘V-o-o-m!’ went a gun and the band began to play ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ and the Cadet Sergeant and the Color Guard handed down the Big Beautiful Flag and there was a lump in my throat, but I didn’t want to cry. I was just GLAD and gee! How I want to be old enough to carry a gun and ‘Present Arms’ to the flag when the sun goes down. But I’m busy these days in war gardens and it’s easy to earn money and every cent I get I count up at sunset and I present it to the Flag!in War Savings Stamps. I’ll help lick these Germans yet,” below which is WSS, for War Savings Stamps of the National War Savings Committee, Washington, D.C., and an American eagle; front flap, describing the book, reads as follows: “The Magnificent Ambersons,” by Booth Tarkington, author of “Seventeen,” “Penrod,” “Monsieur Beaucaire,” etc., “A novel of American life during the big, growing time in the life of an American city. It is the story of change that comes upon America in our own lifetime!a change which has come in such a fashion that we are surprised by our own familiar recognition of it when we find it made into literature in the pages of this story. Every reader will find that he knows the Magnificent Ambersons, and has seen in life what happened to them. In fact, he may live next door to them,” below which is Doubleday, Page & Co., Garden City, New York; the rear flap describes the novel Mam’selle Jo: A Novel of the St. Lawrence Country by Harriet T. Comstock, author of “The Man Thou Gavest,” [1917] etc., reading as follows: “Experience, hard and bitter, had moulded the features of Jo Murry, better known to her French Canadian neighbors as ‘Mam’selle Jo.’ The man’s work she had done all her life had given her face a masculine sterness, her character a masculine ruggedness. But her fine eyes, her lustrous hair, and her warm, generous heart were totally feminine. Winning her way by the work of her hands through a slough of debts to the heights of financial independence, Mam’selle Jo is enabled at last to carry out the long suppressed wish of her motherly heart and adopt a child. Especially dear to her starved maternal instinct is Danielle, fair, slight, ethereal, because of the indefinable suggestion about her of her father, whom Mam’selle Jo had loved in her own youth. The spirit of the book is that of self-sacrifice and the happiness that comes to those who give freely. Danielle herself sacrifices a great career for the sake of the only mother she has ever known!and finds love. Tom Grant makes the supreme sacrifice for his country. And while you may think that Jim Noval’s sacrifices do not equal his compensations, yet it is through the fire of service that his cleansed spirit wins his heart’s desires. These are all people worth knowing and loving,” below which reads, “Net, $1.50,” and “Doubleday, Page & Co., Garden City, New York”); first printing points are that the binding be a light brown [stamped in black on front cover and spine; later copies are maroon or burgundy cloth bindings stamped in black], and that the pages be all white and measure 1⅛ across the sheets; the second part of a trilogy called Growth , consisting also of The Turmoil * (1915; Harper & Brothers; bound in red cloth boards gilt stamped on front cover and spine; illustrated with color frontispiece and eight other drawings by C. E. Chambers; 349 pgs.; $1.35; in a jacket with Chambers color illustration, cream bordered in maroon; Harper code A-P meaning January, 1915 appears on copyright page, stating however “published February, 1915,” with copyright dates 1914 and 1915 both appearing; there was an advance edition of this drawn from magazine plates and inscribed by the publisher; in plain blue paper boards in a stiff green dust jacket solely with title, author and publisher on spine) and *The Midlander (1923; Doubleday, Page & Co.; 493 pgs.; stated 377, but in fact 388 copies of the *first limited edition in blue cloth boards stamped in gold gilt with design insignia on front with author initials; top edge gilt and side untrimmed; in stiff green plain and glassine dust wrappers, lettered only on spine, and matching slipcases; these books were signed and numbered by Tarkington, in anticipation of the trade printing first, which was thus absent any publisher designation of first edition; the book was reviewed by various New York City newspapers in January, 1924); the trilogy was collected in a one-volume edition called Growth , published by Doubleday, Page & Co.