Item #4984 Sherwood Anderson & Other Famous Creoles : A Gallery of Contemporary New Orleans. William Faulkner, William Spratling.
Sherwood Anderson & Other Famous Creoles : A Gallery of Contemporary New Orleans.
Sherwood Anderson & Other Famous Creoles : A Gallery of Contemporary New Orleans.
Sherwood Anderson & Other Famous Creoles : A Gallery of Contemporary New Orleans.
Sherwood Anderson & Other Famous Creoles : A Gallery of Contemporary New Orleans.
Sherwood Anderson & Other Famous Creoles : A Gallery of Contemporary New Orleans.
Sherwood Anderson & Other Famous Creoles : A Gallery of Contemporary New Orleans.
Sherwood Anderson & Other Famous Creoles : A Gallery of Contemporary New Orleans.
Sherwood Anderson & Other Famous Creoles : A Gallery of Contemporary New Orleans.
Sherwood Anderson & Other Famous Creoles : A Gallery of Contemporary New Orleans.
Sherwood Anderson & Other Famous Creoles : A Gallery of Contemporary New Orleans.
Sherwood Anderson & Other Famous Creoles : A Gallery of Contemporary New Orleans.
Sherwood Anderson & Other Famous Creoles : A Gallery of Contemporary New Orleans.

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Sherwood Anderson & Other Famous Creoles : A Gallery of Contemporary New Orleans.

New Orleans: Published by the Pelican Bookshop Press, 1926. 8vo (21.5 x 15.5 cm), decorative brown and white paper over boards with green title label on front cover. 40 illustrations including frontis., 16 hand-colored by Spratling.

First edition, limited to 250 copies. This is copy #31 of fifty signed by Spratling, with some of the plates hand-tinted by him. The present copy is additionally inscribed by Spratling below the printed dedication (which reads “To all the artful and crafty ones of the French Quarter”). Spratling has written: “including and celebrating my publisher (ours) Harrison Smith. W. P. Spratling.” Smith and Robert Haas founded Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, Book Publishers in 1932. In 1936, the firm merged with Random House.

Inspired by Miguel Covarrubias’s The Prince of Wales & Other Famous Americans (1925), this book features thirty-nine delightful caricatures of prominent artists and writers living in the French Quarter during the 1920s. Among those included are Sherwood Anderson, Horace Liveright, Carl Van Doren, Carl Sandberg, John Dos Passos, Anita Loos, Oliver La Farge—and Faulkner and Spratling themselves. Imitating the literary style of Sherwood Anderson, Faulkner here pens the foreword and also arranges and captions Spratling’s drawings. The book is a lovely result of Faulkner and Spratling’s friendship and documents their firsthand observations of the subjects depicted. Faulkner's flat-mate for a period, Spratling would recall how “by the time I would be up, say at seven, Bill would already be out on the little balcony over the garden tapping away on his portable, an invariable glass of alcohol-and-water at hand.”

Born in Hartford, Conn., Harrison Smith (1888–1971) was an editor, critic, and publisher. Schooled at Yale, he served as an editor for Harcourt, Brace & Co. until 1938, where he published several of Sinclair Lewis's great novels, through which the two men became close friends. Smith would also befriend Faulkner after Smith’s firm Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, Inc. published some of Faulkner’s early fiction. The Depression decimated three of Smith's publishing ventures, and in 1836 Harrison Smith & Robert Haas was absorbed by Random House. When Smith joined Saturday Review of Literature in 1938 its circulation was a 30,000; and by the time he retired in 1966 it was 650,000. Smith expanded the Saturday Review's scope to include all of the arts, and he also championed new, young writers. He was a firm exponent of women's rights.

REFERENCES: Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography (Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1974), p. 135.

; Whitman, Alden, “Harrison Smith of the Saturday Review is Dead,” New York Times (New York: Jan. 9, 1971), p. 30.

CONDITION: Good, loss to upper left corner of label on front cover, head of spine chipped, upper portion of spine paper formerly detached and re-applied (the original spine paper is often lacking on this book; it is largely present on this copy), some loss of paper in gutters, light foxing and discoloration to paste-downs and leaves opposite.

Item #4984

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