Land of the Free FIRST EDITION
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938.
First Edition. Hardcover. This important Depression-era photo-book presents Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Archibald MacLeish's verse in conversation with his inspiration: 88 photographs, predominantly taken by photographers employed by the New Deal's Farm Security Administration. In these pages are ex-tenant farmers in Texas, Dust Bowl drought refugees in California, Tennessee coal-miner migrants, an Indiana farmhouse after a flood, erosion in Alabama, industrial brutality amid labor strikes, all witnessed by FSA photographers Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Carl Mydans, and Theodor Jung, along with photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White, industrial photographer William M. Rittasse, filmmaker Willard Van Dyke, German-born Jewish photojournalist John Gutmann, and others. Alongside these portraits of an America struggling environmentally and economically, MacLeish voices: "We wonder whether the dream of American liberty / Was two hundred years of pine and hardwood / And three generations of the grass / And the generations are up: the years over // We don't know / We wonder if the liberty is done: / The dreaming is finished / We can't say / We aren't sure / Or if there's something different men can dream / Or if there's something different men can mean by / Liberty. . . . / Or if there's a liberty a man can mean that's / Men: not land / We wonder / We don't know / We're asking."
9 1/2" X 7 1/4". 93pp text facing 88 photographs. Presents nicely in protective archival sleeved dust jacket. Moderate wear to price-clipped dust jacket, with chipping to head and tail of spine, light creasing, small tears to corners, and long neat tear along spine. Bound in tan linen cloth over boards, with blue strip across boards and upper board and spine lettered in black. Gentle wear and faint soiling to cloth, with slight lean to spine. Binding is sound. Erased bookseller notations to front free endpaper, else pages clean and unmarked. A presentable first printing of this important American photo-book, an influence for Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Very good / good. Item #17044
Price: $245.00