Debs: His Authorized Life and Letters by [SOCIALISM - DEBS] KARSNER, David - 1919

New York: Boni & Liveright, 1919. First Edition. Small octavo (19cm). Maroon cloth boards; dustjacket; frontispiece portrait; ix,244pp. Shallow chip to cloth at base of spine, else a tight, well-preserved copy in the very uncommon pictorial dustwrapper. Jacket with brief losses at head and heel of spine panel (not approaching text), mild abrasions to front panel, and mild overall soil but still a Very Good example. Ownership signature of California historian and author Charles Elmer Upton. Standard biography, written during the 1920 Presidential campaign in which Debs ran as a candidate from his jail cell in Atlanta's Woodstock Prison (and still polled nearly a million votes). Forbidden by his jailers to write, Debs reputedly composed the book's introduction verbally while Karsner transcribed it. Offers a detailed (though partisan) account of Debs's arrest and imprisonment for opposing U.S. entry in to the First World War, with additional chapters on his early career as a trade unionist and co-founder of the American Socialist Party. Rarely seen in dustwrapper.