SWEET MAN.
New York: Viking Press, 1930. First edition. Credited by music historian Elijah Wald with having “the first printed description of a Mississippi juke joint” (“The Blue Blues,” Oxford American, Issue 75, Winter 2011). INSCRIBED BY MILLEN on front endpaper, "Inscribed for/ my friend George Woodruff/ with sincere personal regards/ Gilmore Millen/ Los Angeles/ June 11, 1930." The story of a "Negro vagabond," John Henry, teeming with "passion, love, hate, murder, a horrible lynching, the racy life of the old Beale Street [and] sophisticated life of a decadent household in Hollywood"—from the publisher's jacket blurb (before it devolves into racist stereotypes). Written by a White journalist who spent his childhood and early adulthood on his family's plantation in Mississippi and, later, his own in Arkansas, where he worked, lived and, by his own account, spent at least some of his free time among the Black workers there. “Here is a novel from the lower depths, but fearlessly and powerfully written; and through it gleams the truth about whites and blacks in the South, certain aspects of which no writer has hitherto dared to show.”—James Weldon Johnson. About very good with spine sunned but still readable; in a good, supplied (from another copy) dust jacket with shallow chipping to spine ends and corners.
Item #72040
Price: $425.00