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Hard cover, 8vo in brown paper-covered boards, the titles to the spine in bronze, in a pictorial dust jacket featuring a contemporary photo of the subject, 440pp. First American Edition, first printing. CONDITION: Fine, Like new. In a Near Fine dustjacket. **The subject of this literary biography, Edward Garnett (1868-1937), was part of a hugely influential British literary family who's members had connections with some of the most important Modernist authors of the day. His father, Richard Garnett, once a clergyman, was a prominent British Museum librarian, and with his wife Narney held Thursday night literary salons which attracted contemporary authors to their London home. Edward's wife, Constance Black Garnett, translated a number of Russian authors into English for the first time, essentially bringing Chekov, Turgenev and Dostoevsky to a western audience for the first time. Their son, David Garnett, was a founding member of the Nonesuch Press. Edward Garnett was himself a struggling novelist, but known primarily as a "reader" for other publishers, including T. Fisher Unwin and Jonathan Cape in the early decades of the twentieth century. His mentoring friendship with some of the century's greatest authors is mentioned in his obituary in the New York Times (Feb. 22, 1937): D.H. Lawrence, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, T.E. Lawrence, W.H. Husdon and E.M. Forster. His mentoring friendship with Joseph Conrad, however, was instrumental to inspiring the Polish Russian-Ukrainian èmigrè and political refugee to keep poverty (and writer's block ) at bay at key moments of his career, and this portion of the book is of especial interest in providing details of the various introductions to key figures in this writer's career. **AUTHOR Professor Helen Smith, wrote her prize-winning biography of the modern literary figure Edward Garnett as part of her Ph.D. thesis at the University of East Anglia. The book, published both in the UK and the US, was the joint winner of the Biographer's Club Prize and short listed for the Simply Foxed First Biography Prize, and also the subject of a RSL/Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction. Broad in its discussion of the state of British publishing and bookselling at the turn of the twentieth century; a very readable and informative book.
Ref: LITC 9199
$45.00