Aunt Sara's Wooden God
Boston: The Christopher Publishing House, 1938.
First edition, first printing. An editorial copy, with a small rubber stamp stating such on the rear paste down. 271 pp. Bound in publisher's green cloth lettered in black; lacking a dust jacket. Near Fine with faint mottling to cloth at rear,, light wear to spine ends and partially effaced previous owner notation to front paste down. The accomplished actress and poet's only novel, rooted in African American culture and set in a small Georgian town, written in dialect about the effects of slavery. With a forward written by Langston Hughes, who calls it a "kindred novel" to Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine.
Gilbert, who was often hailed as "America's greatest Negro dramatic actress" appeared in several films and stage productions, including the original touring production of The Green Pastures, a 1950 Broadway version of Tobacco Road with an all-black cast, in Langston Hughes' play, The Mulatto. In the early 1940s, she toured the country performing a one-woman show at historically black colleges, and voice-acted on radio shows, playing Sojourner Truth in a 1943 tribute to black women in America called Heroines in Bronze. An uncommon first edition.
Price: $5,000.00