An Eye for an Eye.
Darrow, Clarence S., [1857-1938]. R[obert] Baird Shuman, [1929-2013], Editor. An Eye for an Eye. Durham, N.C.: Moore Pub. Co., 1969 reprint of the 1905 first edition. xxiv, 213 pp. Publisher's black cloth very good, in lightly worn dust jacket. Editor's presentation inscription "For Mena Webb/ with warm regards./ Bob Shuman/ Raleigh/ 15 August 1969" to verso front free endpaper, with signature to title page. Internally clean. A very good copy. $45. * An Eye for an Eye was Darrow's only fictional work, aside from his autobiographical novel, Farmington, published in 1904. It tells the story of Jim Jackson, who struggles with poverty and harsh circumstances, before finally murdering his wife in a fit of rage. Faced with the gallows, Jackson confesses: "If ther'd been forty scaffolds right before my eyes, I'd have brought down the poker just the same." Darrow's novel is a sociological polemic which foreshadows such later works as Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Abe Ravitz in his Clarence Darrow and the American Literary Tradition (1962) observed that An Eye for an Eye was worthy of a trophy not only for sociological veracity but also for genuine literary achievement. The recipient, "Mena Webb", is the notable American woman writer Wilhelmena Katherine Fuller Webb (1915-2012), novelist, editor, columnist, and biographer. Her papers are held by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Robert Shuman was an author and professor of English at the University of Illinois. (archivesspace.lib.lehigh.edu/repositories/3/resources/426).
Price: $45.00
Book number 86305