From the Library of the Founder of the Black Sparrow Press
LAWRENCE, D.H. Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: Thomas Seltzer. 1923.
8vo. Original blue cloth, spine and upper board lettered in gilt, top-edge stained blue, in the dust-jacket priced $3.00 to upper edge of front flap; pp. 264, [2]; minor pushing to spine tips, gilt lettering dulled but clear, jacket with two small archival tape reinforcements interior of jacket at head of spine; an uncommonly sharp, near-fine copy in a fine, bright jacket; bookplate of Howard Weston Johnson to front pastedown, small booklabel of John K. Martin to rear pastedown.
An uncommonly bright first impression of Lawrence’s pioneering and deeply personal read-ing of American literature, from the library of John K. Martin, founder of the Black Sparrow Press.
In 1918, after years of travel at home and abroad, D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda returned for a while to the Midlands, living in a cottage at Middleton-by-Wirksworth provided by his sister Ada. It was during this period that Lawrence worked on the essays that became Studies in Classic American Literature, substantially rewriting them in 1922 for publication the following year. These studies of Benjamin Franklin, Hector St John de Crèvecœur, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Richard Henry Dana, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman constitute one of the earliest, and still among the most penetrating, attempts by a British writer to come to terms with the American literary tradition.
Eight of the essays first appeared in The English Review between 1918 and 1919, but Lawrence continued to revise them, some undergoing four or five distinct versions. Like Women in Love, which he was writing during the same period, the Studies draw on the author’s engagement with psychoanalysis, as well as religion, anthropology, theosophy, and myth. As John Worthen observes, these essays ‘became symbolic of Lawrence’s state of mind’ at the time: ‘acutely analytical, profoundly abstract and detached. [...] They were hermetic, esoteric, internalized, a way for Lawrence (as he put it) to get it “all off my chest”.’ They are also remarkably acute readings of their subjects. In both fiction and criticism, Lawrence was seeking new ways of writing about the unconscious, finding verbal expression for non-verbal experience. Published 27 August 1923, the number of copies printed is not recorded.
Provenance: From the library of John K. Martin (1930–2025), founder of California’s Black Sparrow Press and publisher of Charles Bukowski, Wyndham Lewis, Charles Olson, Gertrude Stein, and many others. Martin famously provided Bukowski with the stipend that enabled him to leave his job at the Post Office and write full time. Lawrence, together with Pound and Stevens, was among Martin’s greatest literary enthusiasms, and the library he assembled is renowned for the exceptional quality and condition of its books.
Roberts A25a. See Worthen, D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (1991).
SKU: 2125400