Have Come, Am Here.
New York: Viking, [1942].
First edition, with publisher's announcement of release loosely inserted. 8vo. Original blue cloth. About fine in very good dustjacket with some soiling Item #310172
The first book of verse from the Filipino-born Villa. With a Typed Postcard Signed and a Typed Letter Signed, both to Andrew B. Myers (1831-1946), long time professor of English at Fordham and noted collector, and Villa's friend.
José García Villa was born in Manila in 1908. In 1929 he published a series of erotic poems called "Man-Songs" in the Philippines Herald Magazine and was fined for obscenity and suspended for a year from law school. That same year, his short story Mir-i-nisa" won a 1000 peseta prize, which he used to immediately set sail for the United States. He published a collection of stories, Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others, with Scribner in 1933, his last published narrative work. He then moved to the Greenwich Village, where he was the only Asian poet in the modernist community that included e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, and devoted himself to poetry written under the pseudonym Doveglion (Dove, Eagle, Lion). His poetry won him many awards and fellowships, as well as positions at New Directions, CUNY, and the New School, where he spoke desparagingly of narrative, especially of his own early work, as "ideas" and encouraged his students to focus on "words". Since his death in 1997, he's been reprinted and reappraised in the United States, and in the Philipines he's long been considered a giant of their literature.
Price: $350.00 Free Domestic Delivery
