There is a lot of material “tossed overboard” by writers as they work towards a final draft, and a small trove of Williams’s notes and drafts for his Pulitzer Prize-winning work has recently surfaced. Along with the leftovers Selznick hoped Williams would keep are nearly 200 pages of working draft material for the play, and a compelling letter regarding its translation into film, all saved by Frank Merlo, Williams’s partner at the time of its composition. After Merlo’s death the papers devolved to Merlo’s brother, an FBI agent, who, in turn, gave them to his daughters.

The trove includes original working typescript material and occasional manuscript material, including tentative and revised speeches and scenes for the original play; together with a few related notes and letters, such as a substantive missive from film producer Charles Feldman outlining the adaptation process as it was happening.

Each lithograph is limited to 40 numbered copies, signed by the poet and artist. For "McKane's Falls," Merrill worked on lithographic stones in Sanchez’s studio, and for "Perche no spero," Bunting at home with wax tablets. Each production is an arresting visual interpretation of the poet's words. 

Over 300 items, including first editions, presentation and signed copies, limited editions, proofs, pamphlets, holiday cards, and broadsides from an important collection. Featuring all three issues of Heaney’s first separately published work, Eleven Poems; a first edition of Door into the Dark inscribed to Derek Mahon; Clearances inscribed to James O’Halloran with twelve lines of verse; and much more.  

James O’Halloran was a passionate collector of Irish literature and poetry. A longtime Grolier Club member, he co-curated To Set the Darkness Echoing: An Exhibition of Irish Literature, 1950-2000 in 2002 with Stephen Enniss and Ronald Schuchard.

For further information, including a PDF catalogue, please email info@glennhorowitz.com.

It’s a fair question whether in New York the best season for legs is the late spring or the fall, before the rains and the cold.

Our newest publication, featuring an original short story by Louis Begley, is strikingly augmented by eighteen full-color abstract paintings by his son, Peter Begley. With an epilogue, “Cuisine,” in which the artist explicates his craft. 

38 pp., 7 ¼  x 11 ¼ inches, eighteen full-color prints.

Limited issue: 282 signed letterpress copies in wrappers, $75
Deluxe issue: 18 signed letterpress copies, linen bound, slipcased with an original painting, $1,500

We are pleased to announce the acquisition of a world class Joyce collection, with material for sale individually and on view by appointment in our Manhattan offices and in our East Hampton gallery throughout the summer.

This collection, comprised of over 100 books, letters, photographs, and manuscripts by and about Joyce, was built over the course of thirty years by writer and editor Alexander Neubauer, who, drawn to Joyce’s prose, bought his first Joyce piece after high school, in the summer of 1977, on his first visit to Shakespeare & Company in Paris.

This important trove documents Joyce’s life and work. From a school photograph of him at the age of 7 with classmates who would become characters in A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man, and books he owned in school, to a portrait taken of him by Man Ray the year Ulysses was published; from letters to Nora Barnacle – who would become, soon after, Nora Joyce – scheduling dates, to correspondence with his publisher; from early works through Finnegans Wake, to books he inscribed to friends, to books from his library. “Taken together,” writes Neubauer in his preface to the catalogue illustrated with color photographs by David Levinthal, available in limited and deluxe issues, “they suggest evidence of an overarching theme: that despite all efforts to appear a man guarded by ‘silence, exile, and cunning,’ Joyce throughout his life chose to be dependent on a world of connections, a circle of confederates.”

Catalogues feature original color photographs by David Levinthal.

147 pp.; 7 x 10 inches. Cloth issue, $125. Deluxe limited edition, one of 25 copies, with a numbered, signed Levinthal print; in a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase. $2500.

Over 150 first editions, association copies, letters, and more, from an important collection. Including books by both Leonard and Virginia Woolf, their family, and friends. Featuring a lovely copy of their handprinted edition of TS Eliot’s The Wasteland, and the black tulip of the handprinted books of Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press: the memorial volume Poems by Leonard’s brother Sidney, recently killed in the war. 

Please click here for a digital catalog.

For further information, email Sarah@GlennHorowitz.com

On November 22, 1963, following Kennedy’s assassination, John Steinbeck wrote to Lyndon B. Johnson offering “profound respect and loyalty to you in the hard days ahead.” Steinbeck also indicated that he and his wife were in Poland, touring behind the Iron Curtain at Kennedy’s request, “talking with writers and with students.” He continued, “Being non-diplomatic, we have been able to observe many things not ordinarily available. And if these experiences can be of value to you, they are freely offered.” Johnson later replied, “Your letter was comforting to me. I am hopeful that very soon I may sit with you and talk about our country.” The following year, Johnson would award Steinbeck the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civil honor awarded for service in peace time.

Steinbeck's support of Johnson took the form, at times, of speech writing. In this letter to Presidential Special Consultant Eric Goldman he forwards a draft of a speech for the January 1965 inaugural, noting that it would like go unused -- which it largely did. 

Over the course of three pages, Steinbeck repeats the concept of the “Great Society” which Johnson had initiated during his campaign the previous year, but in most other ways he departs from Johnson's oratorical style.  He begins, 

Some there are who think our country is an inheritance, a gift proffered like a sandwich on a clean doily on a silver tray. This is not so. In our beginning we crept, scuttled, escaped, brave and frightened from the safe and settled corners of the earth to a strange and hostile wilderness. Restless energy beyond loneliness and longing drove us to a nameless, inhospitable continent…

He writes this about “the Great Society”:  “The Great Society, as I see it, is not the fixed and sterile polity of the bees nor the ordered and changeless battalions of the ants. It is the miracle of becoming – always becoming, trying, probing, failing, resting and trying again but always gaining a little – perfectable but not perfect.”

Johnson retained the imagery from this passage, with some adjustments: “I do not believe that the Great Society is the ordered, changeless, and sterile battalion of the ants. It is the excitement of becoming – always becoming, trying, probing, falling, resting, and trying again – but always trying and always gaining.”

Though Johnson would build on many of the themes Steinbeck proposed in this draft (notably the wilderness, expansion, and class), he omitted or greatly altered the rhetorical questions, dramatic hyperbole, analogies to running mustangs, and references to a nation’s leader as the “top banana."  

Admittedly, it had been a rush job. Steinbeck told Goldman, "This is the best I can do in the time given me ... It is somewhat over the first time of 3 minutes but I will bet it is shorter than any of the prayers. And now I join the ranks of the loyal, ever the loving Opposition...."

The manuscript of “Christmas Vacation,” a 27-page handwritten story by Capote when he was about ten years old. 

Divided into five chapters (“Christmas Guest”; “The Uninvited Guests”; “Uncle William Makes Trouble”; “The Kids Make Trouble”; “The Hoodlums Leave”) “Christmas Vacation” features a raucous, lively cast of characters, and has been called “by far the most significant and substantial of [Capote’s] childhood literary efforts” (Morrow 139). 

The story features Mrs. Busybody, a “fat old widow” and “public nuisance,” and her foils, a group of unruly neighborhood children, and the family of seven who arrive uninvited to stay with her for the Christmas holiday. Amidst a slapstick array of flying china, whiskey drinking, and fist fights, the disastrous visit of Uncle William, Lulu Belle, and their children unfolds as old Mrs. Busybody comically perseveres. 

There are few surviving examples of Capote’s earliest forays into writing, and biographer Gerald Clarke notes that “those few – sixteen themes, stories, and poems – were saved by one of his English teachers at Trinity, John E. Langford” (Capote: A Biography, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988; p. 50). This manuscript was reproduced in full with a transcription and introductory essay by Bradford Morrow in Conjunctions: 31 Radical Shadows (Annandale-on-Hudson: Bard College, Fall 1998; pp. 139-77).  

***

Following his parents’ divorce, six-year old Truman Streckfus Persons (his surname changed to Capote following his adoption by his mother’s second husband in February 1935) was sent to live with his mother’s relatives, the Faulks, in Monroeville, Alabama. “Christmas Vacation,” originally titled “Mrs. Busybody,” began as Capote’s winning submission for a children’s writing contest in the Mobile Register when he was ten years old. A roman á clef of sorts, the story achieved a degree of notoriety upon its publication in the local paper. 

Monroeville – the Faulk household and its neighbors on South Alabama Avenue in particular – appear to have provided Capote with a wealth of creative material, and “Christmas Vacation” lampoons the adults in his life, including next-door neighbor Frances Lee – mother to Nelle Harper Lee, only a year younger than Capote. According to Lee biographer Charles Shields, Capote disliked Mrs. Lee to such an extent – he thought she was gossipy and eccentric – that he “pilloried her when he was ten years old” with the creation of Mrs. Busybody and that the portrayal was “so true to life” that the young writer became the talk of the town (Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, New York: Henry Holt, 2006; p. 40). Capote later reflected on the local reception of the publication: “I’d walk down the street and people on their front porches would pause, fanning for a moment. I found they were very upset about it. I was a little hesitant about showing anything after that. I remember I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know why I did that, I’ve given up on writing.’ But I was writing more fiercely than ever” (Lawrence Grobel, Conversations with Capote, New York: Da Capo Press, 2000; pp. 53-54). Capote later moved from Monroeville to New York and handed in the story, re-titled “Christmas Vacation,” for a school assignment while he was a sixth-grader at Trinity School in Manhattan.

Together with a later printing of The Good Soldier, lovingly inscribed to the dedicatee of this edition, Esther Gwendolyn “Stella” Bowen: To my always dear Stella, 16 April 1928, Ford Madox Ford.  (The first edition, published in 1915, contained no dedication and no known dedication copy exists of the limited edition issued in 1927.) Bowen was Ford's next romantic interest after Hunt, and when they met and fell in love in 1918, Bowen was 24; Ford, 43. They never married, but traveled together as a couple – and raised a daughter together (Julie, born in 1920) – until they parted ways in Paris a year before the date of this inscription. Largely because of her association with Ford, Bowen enjoyed moderate success as an artist and art critic in the years that followed, and published a successful autobiography in 1941. 

Finally, some interesting ephemera from the book’s later promotional history: nine index cards, ca. 1951, each containing this typed statement: “Ford’s The Good Soldier is one of the fifteen or twenty greatest novels in English produced in our century” and signed and annotated by notable authors of the day. Evelyn Waugh amended the statement to say “I think Ford’s The Good Soldier is one of the finest novels in English written in this century”; and hilariously, Christopher Isherwood offered his dissent, writing, “Sorry, but I don’t agree. Though I would gladly have signed such a statement regarding Parade’s End.” Other enthusiasts include poet Horace Gregory, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jean Stafford, and longtime literary editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, Joseph Henry Jackson.