PEN PICTURES OF MODERN AUTHORS
(Alcott, Louisa May) [Walsh] Shepard, William (ed).
New York: G.P. Putnam, 1882. First edition. 16mo, v, 333pp; smooth dark green cloth stamped in gilt front and spine; beveled edges; light brown floral endpapers. T.e.g. Title page printed in red and black. Tips a trifle bumped and frayed. Near fine. Third in a series entitled "The Literary Life". In his Preface, the editor writes "These are not biographies..., but a series of sketches, anecdotes, and personal reminiscences relating to the more modern authors — that is authors who are now living, or who have died very recently and whose work belongs to the present half of the century". Represented are Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, John Ruskin, John Henry Newman, Alfred Tennyson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Cullen Bryant, Longfellow and Whittier, Lowell and Holmes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Bayard Taylor, Swinburne and Oscar Wilde, the Brownings, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeracy, and "Some Younger Writers" (William Morris, Matthew Arnold, Owen Meredith and Jean Ingelow). The editor drew upon a variety of magazine articles, his own interviews with various authors and reminiscences of others. Margaret Fuller, for instance, describes meeting Thomas Carlyle, a report originally printed by THE NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE and published in AT HOME AND ABROAD. Louisa May Alcott reports her introduction to Jean Ingelow, an account which THE QUEEN, an English periodical first published (this, the first book publication). The suggestion that Alcott a mushy sentimentalist evaporates when she writes of Ingelow: "[she] was plain, rather stout, hair touched with gray, [with] shy yet cordial manners, and a clear, straightforward glance, which I liked so much that I forgave her on the spot for writing those dull stories". A handsome copy. BAL 200. The publisher issued at least two subsequent printings of PEN PICTURES. (Item ID: 14704)
$250.00
