DAVIDMAN, Joy (1915-60)
Price: $495.00
Description:BOOK: Letter to a Comrade. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1938, first edition. Hardbound, 94 pgs. Intact dust jacket in fair condition (water spotting. Boards very good and solid spine. Interior clean and fresh. This appears to be from the personal library of poet-novelist-essayist COUNTEE CULLEN as he has signed on the first free endpaper. Desirable as such and an uncommon title.
DAVIDMAN, Joy (1915-60) Poet and novelist. Wife of author C.S. Lewis (Screwtape Letters).
Davidman was a gifted writer. As an enthusiastic Communist, her poetry, book reviews, and movie reviews often appeared in the New Masses (hereafter NM), the semi-official weekly magazine of Communist Party of the United States of American (CPUSA) from April 1938 through July 1945. In addition, she published two novels, Anya (1940) and Weeping Bay (1950), and Smoke on the Mountain (1953), her interpretation of the Ten Commandments. Anya and Weeping Bay received modest but generally favorable critical scrutiny while Smoke on the Mountain continues to be read and quoted by those doing intensive study of the Decalogue. It is as a poet, however, that she excelled; her Letter to a Comrade (1938) won both the Yale Younger Poet competition and the Russell Loines Memorial award for poetry given by the National Institute of Arts and Letters.