Art Young: His Life and Times
New York: Sheridan House, 1939.
First edition, first printing. Association copy signed by Art Young on the half-title page and warmly inscribed to Sara Bard Field (her name misspelled) with date Nov. 22, 1939. ALS to Field dated Feb. 18, 1941 laid in. xii, 467, [1] pp. Bound in publisher's red cloth stamped in gilt, printed endpapers. Near Fine with light soiling to textblock edges, light toning to endpapers, and thumbing and erased bookseller inscriptions to half-title page. In a Good dust jacket with light soiling, insect damage along upper and lower edges and rear flap fold.
The autobiography of the prominent socialist cartoonist Art Young, inscribed to a woman he names in his book (with the correct spelling of her first name) as one of "the beautiful women I have met who were active in progressive or radical affairs." Sara Bard Field was a suffragist, poet, and Christian socialist, married to the writer and civil liberties activist Charles Erskine Scott Wood. Young refers to Wood in his letter to Field:
"I am impelled to write you because of your good poem in the [Marxist magazine] New Masses. The foreword too interested me because I think of you both -- often I can picture our Grand Old Man looking heroically toward the sunset. Tell him, I'm with him, such a spirit will never die. We of the old guard: artists and writers, recall his fine record of doing and daring, when we meet here in New York and discourse."
Young signs with his name and a small sketch of a sunset over water. He wrote his affectionate note two days before Wood's 89th birthday, a touching tribute from one famous pacifist to another not long before their country would be plunged into total war -- the subject of the poem that prompted Young's letter.
Price: $350