Wild Plum [Signed & Inscribed]

New York: The Macmillan Company, 1926. First Edition (presumed; no prior editions or printings cited). Octavo in purple cloth, dust jacket; 71 pp; 20 cm Near Fine volume, boards smooth and clean, binding firm, corners quare; deckle edge to tectblock, minimal toning to pages; dust jacket very good, closed tear to tip of spine, open tears to back of jacket; mild toning to jacket. [Author inscribed and signed]. Hardcover.

Eary 20th Century American poetry in verse. Johns is included in the important anthology American Poetry: The Twentieth Century (Penguin, 2000) This copy includes a lenghty inscription by the author. Orrick Johns (1887–1946) was an American poet, playwright, and journalist associated with the St. Louis literary circle that included T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams. Emerging during the early modernist period, he gained national attention when his poem Second Avenue won The Lyric Year prize in 1912—a controversial award because it was judged superior to a submission by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Johns’s verse combined urban realism with social critique, later giving way to politically engaged, proletarian poetry during the 1930s. A member of the Communist Party for a time, he also wrote plays and an autobiography, Time of Our Lives (1937). His work reflects the shifting American sensibility between the bohemian avant-garde and Depression-era social consciousness.