Author: WILSON, Edmund
Title: The Shores of Light. A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties Inscribed to Floyd Dell
Description: New York, Farrar, Straus and Young, Inc. (1952). First Edition. Hardcover. Chapters on T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. E. Cummings, H. L. Mencken, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Eugene O'Neill, Thornton Wilder, Virginia Woolf, and others, as well as an exploration of broader cultural and political themes of the time, including the impact of World War I on the intellectual climate, the rise of modernism, and the emergence of new social movements. INSCRIBED and SIGNED on the front endpaper to Wilson's friend Floyd Dell (1887-1969), an American novelist, playwright, poet, and literary critic, who enjoyed national prominence in the early 20th Century: "To Floyd Dell,/whose work of the/20's and pre-20's did/so much to make possible/the work of younger writers,/with the affection/of Edmund Wilson/New York/Oct 8, 1952." Dell became a leader of the pre-WWI bohemian community in Greenwich Village and managing editor of Max Eastman's radical magazine THE MASSES, for which he was twice put on trial for publishing subversive literature. Dell is mentioned four times in Wilson's book including this first mention on page 69: "It is not, of course, in comparison with current American novels that I call Mr. [Carl] Van Vechten prosaic. Beside Floyd Dell and Willa Cather, he is Ariel, Till Eulenspiegel." And on the very last page of text in the book (page 793), which Dell has folded the upper margin corner to mark, Wilson writes: "We [neighbor Phyllis Duganne] talked about Edna Millay, and she told me of a memory she had of seeing her years ago in Greenwich Village running around the corner of Macdougal Street, flushed and laughing 'like a nymph,' with her hair swinging. Floyd Dell, also laughing, pursued her." At the time Dell had a passionate affair with the yet-to-be-discovered Millay. Superb association. Bulked edges of text darkened with slight effect on the endpapers, apparently from smoke, with a very faint odor. Very Good in a Very Good dustwrapper with minor fading .

Keywords: Signed, Modern First Editions, Association Copy, Modern Firsts, Literary Criticism, Floyd Dell, Edna St. Vincent Millay Signed Modern First Editions Literature: American Association Copy


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