RARE GROSSET/DUNLAP UNIVERSAL LIBRARY, "LEAVES OF GRASS," WALT WHITMAN/A.SKRENDA

Description: RARE GROSSET & DUNLAP UNIVERSAL LIBRARY, "LEAVES OF GRASS (1850-1881)," WALT WHITMAN WITH DUST JACKET BY ALFRED SKRENDA. GROSSET & DUNLAP, NY [1956]. 100-YEAR-ANNIVERSARY EDITION. 537PP. A superb rare copy of Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" published by Grosset & Dunlap for their exclusive Universal Library line in c.1956 to celebrate the book's Centennial. The book is in very good condition commensurate with age; the binding, boards, and leaves are 100% correct. The dust jacket, while complete, exhibits some minor wear -- but does feature the artwork of well-respected dust jacket artist Alfred Skrenda. Leaves of Grass is a poetry collection by American poet Walt Whitman. Though it was first published in 1855, Whitman spent most of his professional life writing, rewriting, and expanding Leaves of Grass until his death in 1892. Six or nine individual editions of Leaves of Grass were produced, depending on how they are distinguished. This resulted in vastly different editions over four decades. The first edition was a small book of twelve poems, and the last was a compilation of over 400.The collection of loosely connected poems represents the celebration of his philosophy of life and humanity and praises nature and the individual human's role in it. Rather than focusing on religious or spiritual matters, Leaves of Grass focuses primarily on the body and the material world. Its poems do not rhyme or follow standard rules for meter and line length.Leaves of Grass is regarded by many scholars as a completely do-it-yourself project. Whitman chose his idealized self as the subject of the book, created the style in which it was written and worked hard and intelligently to perfect the style over a period of six or seven years, creating the personality of the proletarian bard, the supposed writer of the poems.Leaves of Grass is also notable for its discussion of delight in sensual pleasures during a time when such candid displays were considered immoral. The book was highly controversial during its time for its explicit sexual imagery, and Whitman was subject to derision by many contemporary critics. Over time, however, the collection has infiltrated popular culture and became recognized as one of the central works of American poetry.Among the works in this collection are "Song of Myself", "I Sing the Body Electric", and "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking". Later editions would include Whitman's elegy to the assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd".Alfred George Skrenda (1897–1978) was an American illustrator, particularly of book dust jackets.Skrenda was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the United States. His parents were from Austria-Hungary, and married there in 1887 before emigrating to the US.Skrenda was designing dust jackets for Grosset & Dunlap from at least as early as 1928, particularly for popular romantic fiction such as May Christie's Love's Ecstasy (1928). In 1929, he illustrated the jacket for Rupert Hughes's She Goes to War and other stories, published to tie in with a film based on the title story, She Goes to War, released that year. In 1930, he illustrated Lefty Leighton, one of the Buddy Books for Boys series, by Percy Keese Fitzhugh.In 1932, Skrenda was the co-author of Minute Stories from the Bible with Isabel Juergens, published by Grosset & Dunlap, which Writer's Digest called a "handy and inexpensive" addition to a feature writer's reference library. In 1934, Skrenda and Juergens co-authored the picture book Minute Wonders of the World, which he also illustrated. A review in Atlantica noted that although many "world wonder books" had been published in the 1870s and 1880s, there had been no up-to-date illustrated volumes published in the few years preceding. In 1939, he created a cover for Alexandre Dumas' The Man in the Iron Mask to tie in with the film version released that year. He designed several covers for Grace Livingston Hill, and the cover for an edition of Dashiell Hammett's The Dain Curse. He designed the covers for the 1936 novel by Harry Hamilton on which the film Banjo on My Knee of the same year was based.According to the author Martin Salisbury, Skrenda "was particularly adept at billowing skirts and heroic gazes", and his designs with their "melodrama and theatrically overwrought posing, have a richly appealing period charm."

Price: 137.99 USD

Location: Saint Charles, Missouri

End Time: 2025-01-18T04:32:20.000Z

Shipping Cost: 5.38 USD