CRANE, Hart

The Bridge

First American edition, preceded by the very limited French edition. Photograph by Walker Evans. Fine in a very good, spine-faded dustwrapper with a couple of internally repaired short tears. Inscribed by the poet: "For Tom Smith with best wishes, Hart Crane." This edition was extensively revised and corrected following the first privately printed edition of 275 copies published by the Black Sun Press in Paris three months earlier. Smith was the editor-in-chief for the publisher Horace Liveright to whom, some evidence exists, Crane turned to when he was short on funds. Smith picked a succession of best sellers for Liveright beginning with Hendrick Van Loon's The Story of Mankind (1921). Equally important, he selected up-and-coming writers Eugene O'Neill (Gold: A Play in Four Acts), Ernest Hemingway (In OurTime), William Faulkner (Soldier's Pay), T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land), Sherwood Anderson (Windy McPherson's Son), and Hart Crane (The Bridge). He also edited Dreiser's An American Tragedy. As Manuel Komroff wrote in his tribute to Smith and to his lasting influence on American literature: "Here was born a new American renaissance. All literature was changed and the relation between literature and the great American public was also changed ... much of this change was due to Tom Smith ... No one literary man in America has to his credit so much and no one literary man has carried this load with such humble modesty ..." (The Book of Tom Smith. A Biblio-Epitaph. Privately Printed, 1942). The relationship between Liveright and Smith inspired Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur to co-write and co-direct the 1935 film The Scoundrel (for which they won an Academy Award for their screenplay). One of the highspots of 20th Century poetry, rare signed, and with an excellent association. Connolly 100.

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