Lot Details
Lot 92
CRANE, HART White Buildings
. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1926. First edition, second issue, inscribed on the front blank in purple ink "For Marcia and Russell [Davenport] / with the pornographic penmanship of Hart Crane." Original dark blue cloth backed marbled paper boards. 7 1/2 x 5 inches (19.5 x 13 cm); 58 pp. Boards rubbed, the spine faded, some light spotting and toning, the rear blank and pastedown with pencil notes and a small drawing.
An exceedingly rare inscribed copy of Hart Crane's White Buildings, one of approximately 500 copies of the first edition of his first book. The book is inscribed to Marcia and Russell Wheeler Davenport, members of Crane's literary circle. The book was likely inscribed after Marcia and Russell were married in 1929 and Russell, a novelist, joined the editorial staff of Fortune magazine, where Crane worked for a short time in 1930 (in The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane, Paul Mariani records Crane's reading of Davenport's 1929 novel Through Traffic). Marcia Davenport had been a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1927 and in 1932 published the first major American biography of Mozart. Crane killed himself in April 1932 by throwing himself off a boat into the Gulf of Mexico thus inscribed copies of his books, particularly to contemporary writers, are quite scarce.
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