biography

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Row, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, lightly worn dust jacket that's price-clipped. 434 pages, b&w illustrations. This is a full-scale biography of John Brown. "John Brown was a profoundly religious man dedicated to emancipation and Negro rights..." He "tried to overthrow slavery in the South itself by attacking Harpers Ferry and inciting a slave insurrection."Was Brown a vicious fanatic, or the greatest abolitionist hero in history?" This history is based on "contemporary letters, diaries, journals, newspapers, published reports, and recollections of eyewitnesses, this book is especially notable for providing the first really full account ever written of Brown's career before he went to Kansas..." Bold presentation inscription on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Northampton MA, Kraushar Press, 1st, 1943, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, orange cloth covers with black lettering, 163 pages, b&w photos. Inspired by a visit to Stoney Reservation in Alberta, Canada, the author spent 15 years visiting & living among 47 tribes, and developed a touring show of pictures, songs, dances, stories & sign language. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. South Windsor, CT, Barney E. Daley, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 300+ pages. Hardcover. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR. Bound in green cloth; gilt lettering & design on spine and front cover. From the introduction (Evan Lawn): "Whether one reads straight through or reads here and there in a checkered fashion, every reader will enjoy meeting Barney. ...And if the reader happens to be an historian, these memoirs will be prized as a treasure trove of living information about rural, daily life before electricity and indoor plumbing."

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1979, Hardcover in a nice dust jacket with mild fading to spine, 347 pages. This work is the autobiography of Arai Hakuseki, the celebrated Confucian scholar who holds a prominent position in Japanese history as the influential adviser to Shogun Tokugawa Ienobu and his successor Ietsugu. Hakuseki's administrative reforms, his voluminous writings, and his advice on a multitude of topics--coinage, foreign trade, taxation, diplomatic protocol, justice, the samurai code and benevolent government, for example. governed most of the policies implemented during Ienobu's rule and influenced many of those of his successors. The book contains notes, biographical notes, appendices, a chronology, maps, and an index. Name on front flyleaf, otherwise a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. UK, Oxford University Press, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 310 pages. Tolkien's Lost Chaucer uncovers the story of an unpublished and previously unknown book by the author of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien worked between 1922 and 1928 on his Clarendon edition Selections from Chaucer's Poetry and Prose, and though never completed, its 160 pages of commentary reveals much of his thinking about language and storytelling when he was still at the threshold of his career as an epoch-making writer of fantasy literature. Drawing upon other new materials such as his edition of the Reeve's Tale and his Oxford lectures on the Pardoner's Tale, this book reveals Chaucer as a major influence upon Tolkien's literary imagination. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Crown, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 644 pages, b&w illustrations. After a protracted squabble over private papers with the playwright's estate, Leverich delivers this hefty first volume of a projected two-volume life of Tennessee Williams (1911-1983). In it, Leverich, who produced several of Williams's plays and calls himself Williams's "chosen biographer", covers the years through 1945, when The Glass Menagerie opened on Broadway. Treated are Williams's youth in Mississippi and St. Louis; the college years at the universities of Missouri and Iowa; bumming around (but always writing) in New Orleans and Greenwich Village; the disaster of his first Broadway play (it closed in Boston); script writing, or avoiding it, at MGM's Hollywood mill; and, finally, the evolution of Menagerie, a wonderfully detailed and dramatic case history in itself. Leverich's overworked conceit, which he restates at intervals, is that this is the life of Tom Williams, a "repressed puritan" poet, who in time created a more flamboyant public persona called Tennessee. A few matters are set straight. Leverich maintains his subject's active homosexual life started in his late 20s, later than Williams stated in his memoirs, and that his sister's infamous lobotomy came later than his mother claimed. Although the accumulation of information is impressive, the lower Leverich keeps his own profile and editorial commentary the better his book is, which means it is at its best when it simply reproduces Williams's sporadically kept journal. If you believe that all the details of a life are but preparation for a single event, in this case, the opening of a remarkable play, this is an impressively argued biography.

NY, G.P. Putnams, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover. Over 200 Illustrations, 218 pages includes a bibliography of the writer and illustrator's book

Hardcover. NY, G.P. Putnams, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover. Over 200 Illustrations, 218 pages includes a bibliography of the writer and illustrator's book bibliography. Previous owner's inscription on the front fly leaf, wrinkle to front flap of dj, otherwise bright and clean.

Hardcover. NY, William Morrow, 3rd pr., 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 352 pages, b&w photos. The Autobiography pulls no punches: Curtis debunks myths of stardom and glamour with a raw, uncensored, street-honed New York bite. The scope of his memoirs includes: rooming with Marlon Brando in Hollywood in the late forties; a glamorous marraige to Janet Leigh in 1951, and the extraordianry days during his first flush of success.a fully detailed description of his descent into alcohol and cocaine addiction in the 1970s and 1980s; and his therapeutic, ongoing work as a visual artist. Clean, bright copy in a similar dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, Rizzoli, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 304 pages, illustrated in color and b&w throughout. Spotless and tight copy. American architect Morris Lapidus is best known as the designer of glamorous postwar resort hotels in Florida, such as the Fontainebleau (1954) and the Eden Roc (1955) in Miami Beach, and the Americana in Bal Harbour (1956). Yet in a remarkable sixty-year career that began in 1926, he designed more than 500 retail stores, hotels, apartment complexes, and stage sets that captured the popular spirit and changing face of Main Street America in the twentieth century.

Hardcover. NY, Meredith Press, 2nd pr., 1969, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, 214 pages, b&w photos. INSCRIBED on half title as follows " ___________, I hope you enjoy the book as much as I did living it" and signed Toots. Tight binding text unmarked, closed tears repaired internally to back panel of jacket.

Hardcover. Boston, A.J. Wright, 1st, 1848, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 300 pages, illustrated with 6 b&w engravings from sketches done by the author. Interesting sailing, whaling adventures by a 14-year veteran seaman. Embossed brown cloth with gilt design on cover, gilt lettering and design on spine. Spine cloth chipped, worn at top and bottom. Previous owner's signature in pencil on front fly leaf. Corners show wear, internally very good with only minor foxing.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1938, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 370 pages. Index, illustrated with black and white plates. Has folding genealogical chart, bibliography and index. Declared as "the first complete biography in English" of the notorious French painter (1864-1901), with new material from letters, interviews with surviving contemporaries, etc. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 1966, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in an unclipped, lightly soiled dust jacket. Yellow cloth stamped in purple and black; 370 pages, illustrated with drawings by Leslie Saalburg. Here Gingrich, the publisher of Esquire, shares his feelings on food, automobiles, smoking pipes, violins, haberdashery and a litany of other esoteric subjects.

Hardcover. Camden NJ, International Marine, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 278 pages, b&w illustrations. Navigation at sea was a matter of guesswork until well into the 19th century. Changing that became the obsession of Matthew Fontaine Maury. While others built railroads, Maury mapped highways of wind and current over the seas. Hearn uses Maury's career as a window on America's maritime development in the 19th century, including the clipper-ship era of the 1850s, the rise of steam and steel, and the Civil War. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Dey Street Books/Morrow, 1st, 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 437 pages. Celebrated NPR music critic Ann Powers explores the life and career of Joni Mitchell in a lyrical style as fascinating and ethereal as the songs of the artist herself. In Traveling, Powers seeks to understand Mitchell through her myriad journeys. Through extensive interviews with Mitchell's peers and deep archival research, she takes readers to rural Canada, mapping the singer's childhood battle with polio. She charts the course of Mitchell's musical evolution, ranging from early folk to jazz fusion to experimentation with pop synthetics. She follows the winding road of Mitchell's collaborations with other greats, and the loves that emerged along the way, all the way through to the remarkable return of Mitchell to music-making after the 2015 aneurysm that nearly took her life. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Da Capo Press, reprint, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 245 pages, b&w photos. Sidney Bechet (1897-1959) was one of the most brilliant exponents of New Orleans jazz. A prodigy on the clarinet, he soloed with Bunk Johnson's orchestra at age eleven, was improvising cornet-clarinet duos with Buddy Petit at age fifteen. Leaving New Orleans in the 1920s, Bechet took his Creole sound and spirit to New York, where he adopted the soprano saxophone and soon developed the unique style that marked his special artistry.

Hardcover. New York, Blue Rider Press, First Edition, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 267 pages. Hardcover. Full color illustrations throughout. Bright, crisp dust jacket with light, marginal wear to edges. Clean & unmarked. A nice copy.

Hardcover. New York, ATRIA BOOKS, 1st, 2015, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 324 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Some black and white pictures.

Hardcover. New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 220 pages. 176 b&w and color plates, fold outs. Biography of Ernst Trova, self-taught painter and contemporary sculpture artist, known especially for his series entitled Falling Man. White cloth, gilt lettering to spine, gilt design on front, Very nice, clean and well preserved copy. Looks as good as new.

Hardcover. NY, Crown, 2nd pr., 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket with minor edgewear. 394 pages, color and b&w illustrations. Stan Lee was one of the most famous and beloved entertainers to emerge from the twentieth century. He served as head editor of Marvel Comics for three decades and, in that time, became known as the creator of more pieces of internationally recognizable intellectual property than nearly anyone: Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men, Black Panther, the Incredible Hulk . . . the list goes on. His carnival-barker marketing prowess helped save the comic-book industry and superhero fiction. His cameos in Marvel movies have charmed billions. When he died in 2018, grief poured in from around the world, further cementing his legacy. But what if Stan Lee wasn't who he said he was? To craft the definitive biography of Lee, Abraham Riesman conducted more than 150 interviews and investigated thousands of pages of private documents, turning up never-before-published revelations about Lee's life and work. True Believer tackles tough questions: Did Lee actually create the characters he gained fame for creating? Was he complicit in millions of dollars' worth of fraud in his post-Marvel life? Which members of the cavalcade of grifters who surrounded him were most responsible for the misery of his final days?

Hardcover. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 396 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on half-title page. Clean, tight copy with minor wear to covers and dust jacket.

Hardcover. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, First Edition, 1961, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 221 pages. Hardcover. Brown cloth covers with gilt decoration to cover, gilt titles to spine. Full page, full color & bw illustrations throughout. Clean, unmarked text. A nice copy.

Hardcover. London, England, Hammond, Hammond & Co. Ltd., 1st Edition, 1953, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 2 Volume Set, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY. 1560 total pages. Hardcovers. Black cover boards, gilt title on spine. Light tanning from age to pages. Bindings good. Spines straight. A record of one of America's most distinguished diplomatic careers.