Georgia Nigger
New York: Brewer, Warren and Putnam, 1932.
First edition, first printing. [x], 241, [3], [27] pp. with 14 coated illustration leaves at rear. Bound in publisher's red cloth lettered in gilt. Very Good with sunned spine, moderate wear and mottling to cloth, bumping to lower corners, and trivial spotting to upper textblock edge. Light discoloration from printers glue to endpapers, light toning to contents; overopened at several places.
Muckraking journalist John L. Spivak's novelistic expose of the cycle of Southern debt peonage and imprisonment. The photo section at rear includes images of documents and of chain gang prisoners being subjected to various torments. An important pre-Civil Rights book that raised awareness of segregation's brutality during the Popular Front era. Spivak was a dedicated Communist and collaborator with the Soviet NKVD who would spend the early Cold War writing under pen names. This book was brought to modern audiences in 2012 by the University of South Carolina Press as Hard Times on a Southern Chain Gang.
Price: $2,800