City of discontent;: An interpretive biography of Vachel Lindsay, being also the story of Springfield, Illinois, USA, and of the love of the poet for that city, that State and that Nation

Bobbs-Merrill, 1952-01-01. Hardcover. Acceptable/Acceptable. Bobbs-Merrill [Published date: 1952]. Hard cover, 402 pp. Stated First Edition. Acceptable in Acceptable dust jacket. Green cloth covered boards with gold lettering on front and spine. Light bumping and scuffing to edges of covers. Binding tight. Pages lightly aged but otherwise clean and unmarked. Dust jacket has several 3/4" or less nicks and tears and light creasing and fraying along the edges. Light to moderate overall scuffing, soiling and fading to jacket as well. NOT price clipped ($4.50). Now in an archival-quality (removable) Brodart Cover. NOT Ex-library. NO remainder marks. [Excerpts from jacket flaps] The City of Discontent was Vachel Lindsay's Springfield. It was the birthplace to which he returned from his wanderings in dark streets, in vast landscapes, for in its homely features he saw foreshadowed a city of justice and beauty. Before he could illuminate ordinary lives with this compassionate vision, he had to master his own need of love, his poverty and despair. City of Discontent is biography, but not biography in a conventional sense. Mark Harris has reconstructed the life of Lindsay and the nature of Lindsay's America on a firm base of research. In places the intuition and narrative purpose of a literary artist have led him to imagine scenes and characters, not as a distortion of fact but as an enlargement of its meaning. His purpose remains to arrive at whole truth as he sees it. . . In vivid re-creations, Mark Harris shows us this America coming in a multitude to listen to silver-tongued Bryan, marching away to a world war for the first time, honking along in the first automobiles, making money hand over fist, and losing it. It was Lindsay's choice to turn his back on a medical career, and explore the streets . . At last his experiences coalesced into poems, vibrant with music and emotion, which are part of our heritage. Thousands remember Vachel Lindsay as he would stand on the platform, hand on hip, head thrown back, holding his audience with the passionate rhythms of "The Congo" or "General William Booth Enters Into Heaven," or urging; and instructing them in his Gospel of Beauty, his ideals of citizenship, his vision of new cities. . . City of Discontent mores the reader to understand an age whose potentials have not yet been fully realized, and inspires a confidence in the people of our land which is as welcome today as it is rare.