Dark Laughter

New York: Grosset & Dunlap, (1925).

Price: $1,500.00

Hardcover. Reprint edition. Slightly spine-cocked, else very near fine lacking the dust jacket. Inscribed by Anderson using the whole of the half-title: "Inscribed to Miss Mildred Esgar in Jackson, Where besides herself and Eleanor Copenhaver there were no other women & many many men. In spite of all this they remained courteous to poor me. How could I help being grateful. Sherwood Anderson April 13 - '32." Laid into the copy is a 7" x 5" gelatin silver snapshot photograph of Anderson in his Virginia writing cabin, Signed: "Love to Mildred, Sherwood Anderson." Anderson must indeed have been grateful, as he married Eleanor Copenhaver, his fourth (and final) wife, the following year. *Dark Laughter* was his most commercially successful novel, a James Joycean-influenced rumination on the new sexual freedom.

Item #622537

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Sherwood Anderson
birth name: Sherwood Anderson
born: 9/13/1876
died: 3/8/1941

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Biography

Author who strongly influenced American short-story writing between World Wars I and II. His prose style, based on everyday speech and derived from the experimental writing of Gertrude Stein, was markedly influential on Ernest Hemingway. - Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literaturemore

Collecting tips:

Anderson's most desirable book is Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life, (1919) which is a rare and valuable book in its easily soiled, printed white jacket. Curiously, we once handled a copy that another dealer had sent out to have cleaned, and the paper restorer who cleaned it managed to wash all the printing off of the clay-coat jacket. Apparently the original printer of the jacket hadn't used a fixative on the ink, and the ink was, in effect, still "wet." Needless to say, it didn't much help the value of the book. Most of Anderson's other books of the period do occasionally show up in jacket, with his first book Windy MacPherson's Son (1916) and Dark Laughter (1925) probably among the more desirable.

Email us to request a printed copy of our catalog of Sherwood Anderson Rare Books and First Editions (or download it via the link as a 1.66 MB pdf file). We also offer a comprehensive Sherwood Anderson Bibliography and Price Guide.more