Paul Robeson: Negro [with]: Typed Letter Signed from the Author

London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1930. Hardcover. Very Good. First English edition. Octavo. 153pp. Illustrated throughout from black and white photographs. Bookplate of Reverend Canon A.W. Parsons on front pastedown, a few faint pencil marks in the text, moderate foxing on foredge, some stains and sunning on spine, about very good lacking the dustwrapper. Tipped onto the front fly is a one-page Typed Letter Signed by Eslanda Goode Robeson and dated February 24, (no year) to Parsons that reads: "Mr. Robeson has asked me to thank you for your kind letter, and for your very constructive interest in his work. I am enclosing your list, to which I have added a few, and checked those which Mr. Robeson considers important and typical. I do hope you and Mrs. Parsons will come back stage at Leicester, after the concert is over, and say hello to Mr. Robeson. He will be looking forward to it." A small handbill advertising Robeson's records, with several marked in pencil, is also laid-in.

Written by his wife Eslanda and originally published in the U.S. by Harper & Brothers in 1930, *Paul Robeson: Negro* was the first biography of the legendary athlete, baritone, and actor of stage and screen. According to their son, Paul Robeson, Jr., to whom the book was dedicated, his father had no direct involvement in the book's writing, and was "deeply angered" by its depiction of him as a lazy, immature artist in need of guidance. Yet Robeson also credited Eslanda as the catalyst for his acting career, and certainly relied on her for guidance, as she was his business manager. Despite Paul's objections, the biography was well received, with W.E.B. Du Bois placing it in the "Must Read" category in the September 1930 issue of *The Crisis*, the official magazine of the NAACP.

As indicated by the bookplate and letter, this copy belonged to a British priest who was interested in Robeson's recordings. The singer himself was the son of a Presbyterian minister and spirituals were a primary staple of his catalog. Robeson also had a special relationship with Great Britain. He had spent most of the 1930s making films there, and many of the selections in this brochure that he deemed "important and typical" were spirituals from those films, demonstrating both clear pride in his British output, and, likely an acknowledgment of Parsons' own citizenship. Noticeably, there are no checkmarks next to his two *Show Boat* recordings, among the most famous and celebrated in his body of work.