Charles norris author (4 Ergebnisse)

Hardcover. Zustand: Brand New. 230 pages. 6.00x0.69x9.00 inches. In Stock.

hardcover. Zustand: Good.

First Edition. First Edition. Basis for the 1931 film directed by John M. Stahl. Included with the book is an extraordinary original bi-fold program for the April 17, 1931 Hollywood premiere of Stahl's film at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles, printed in black and gold on lavender card stock, styled to emulate the novel's dust jacket, with Rockwell Kent's beautiful jacket illustration replicated on the front cover. A native of Chicago, Charles Norris worked as a journalist for some years before finding success as a novelist and playwright whose prescient fiction often dealt with contentious issues like modern education, hereditary and environmental influences, big business, and ethics. His eighth novel advocates for reproductive choice, relating the story of a Catholic family gradually torn apart by too many children and lack of access to birth control. Book: Fine and unread in a Fine dust jacket. Contemporary owner name on front pastedown. Film program: Lavender card stock, with titles and design in black and gilt. Fine.…

4pp, 12mo. On four loose leaves. In fair condition, lightly aged and worn, with minor traces of grey paper mount along edges on blank reverses. The poem is titled 'The Dream of Fine Editors | (after the dinner to J. N. Dunn. April 23rd. 1897)'. (At the time of the dinner the Scottish journalist James Nicol Dunn (1856-1919) was on the verge of being appointed editor of the Morning Post, a position he would hold from May 1897 to January 1905.) There is no record of the poem having been published, and it is likely to have been written for after-dinner recitation only. It is 72 lines long, arranged in 18 quatrains. It begins: 'I dreamed I walked the Street of Bouverie | Where are pale lamps that mock the sable night, | "The Halfpenny John", Bradbury et cie | And also "Black & White"' | Walking, I heard a voice behind me say: | "Not vainly are my Hours and minutes spent. | I have a scheme a cert. - can't fail to pay | Three hundred pounds per cent."' The voice is that of the first of the five editors to appear to Pain in the poem, Charles Norris Williamson (1859-1920), editor of 'Black and White': 'fair, frock-coated, tall, | Sanguine, erratic, with enquiring eye | [] | 'Twas he the earliest figure of our past | Who sowed the seed whereof we reap the flow'r'. Williamson departs ('With pince-nez gleaming like an angel's smile | Went C. N. Williamson'), to be replaced by the editor of 'Chapman's Magazine of Fiction': 'O Oswald Crawfurd [(1834-1909)], courtly, consular, | With Fleet Street's maidens circling raind abait'. The third editor is an unnamed 'snappy man [] | And short and sharp barked out his little day; | In all the converse of the C. M. G. | Save that he didn't stay.' The fourth editor 'who stammered, stared with a lack-lustre eye' is also unnamed. He is a disreputable editor: 'Took his own stories, took his sister's too, | Likewise his cousin's, and his aunt's as well. | Sometimes we print them still we're forced to do - | But "Hell!" we murmur, "Hell!"' The final editor is Dunn himself: 'The one that bragged the least and did the most, | Yet left a weekly illustrated place | To take a morning post. | And as I spoke with him, the dream went by, | Through garden windows came the dawning sun | And I was Barry Pain, and knew that I | Had dined with J. N. Dunn'. The poem ends with Pain asking pardon for drinking from 'a strictly "private" bottle': 'Contrition's tear-drop on my eye-lid starts - | Partially drunk, but like the curate's egg, | "Quite excellent in parts"'. See Pain's entry in the Oxford DNB.…