RICHARD STERN - The Books in Fred Hampton's Apartment

, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1974. First Edition, Binding: Cloth, Very Good/Fair. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall 024102451X Hardback Cloth. Very Good/Fair. First Edition. Hardback. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. Fred Hampton was a young Black Panther leader killed in a pre-dawn police raid on his home in Chicago. However, this book is not about Hampton or the Panthers. Stern visited Hampton's house the day after the killings. What impressed him most were not the bloodstains and the squalor, but the books that lay scattered on the f loor as though their owner had just been interrupted in his reading. From the subjects of these books, the author saw Hampton in a new light, not as an embittered criminal but as someone interested in growth and creativity. In this collection of his published and unpublished writings, Richard Stern has overcome the formidable problem of making a coherent book out of a miscellany, drawing people, p laces, ideas and institutions into a broad theory of art. This book is a personal recreation of the atmosphere of America during the last decade, enveloing politics and poety, Nixon and Catch 22. Tiny tear to top of D/J. Watermarks on D/J.