Idylls of the Ghetto and Other Poems.
New York City: Rand Book Store, 1927.
Price: $125.00
About the item
First edition, signed issue, limited to 100 "autographed, numbered and specially bound copies. 90 pages. Contains a four-page introduction by Joseph T. Shipley. Inscribed by S. A. De Witt on the colophon leaf: "For Joel Cling, with the respect due a regular feller in art + life + Letters, from S. A. De Witt 4/20/28.". 8vo. Cream cloth backed blue boards, spine is quite worn and soiled, with one-inch bumped tear at crown, 2 1/2 inch tear at base of spine.
Item #325469
"The poetry of Sam de Witt is propaganda for a curiously compounded personality. Bred in a slum section of New York City, yet risen from that environment, he breaks the gloom of a social cynicism with a rift of individual hope" (from the introduction by Joseph T. Shipley). Samuel Aaron De Witt was a New York State Socialist Party Assemblyman, and was one of five Assemblymen expelled, during the Red Scare of 1920, on the grounds that their membership in the Socialist Party constituted disloyalty to the United States. He is also the author of Riding the Storm and Iron Monger.
