REMEMBRANCE ROCK

New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1948. First Trade Edition. Cloth. Near Fine/Very Good. SIGNED by the Author on the front free endpaper, thick 8vo, black cloth with gold lettering on spine, archival mylar-protected pictorial dust jacket (price-clipped) depicting a colorful painting by Paul Sample, [xii] + 1067 pages. Carl August Sandburg (1878 - 1967) was a Swedish-American poet, writer, and editor. He won three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. During his lifetime, Sandburg was widely regarded as "a major figure in contemporary literature", especially for volumes of his collected verse, including Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), and Smoke and Steel (1920). <br/> <br/> Remembrance Rock is Carl Sandburg's only novel. Sandburg described it as an epic, weaving the mystery of the American Dream with the costly toil and bloody struggles that gone to keep alive and carry further that Dream. The author, his wife, and two daughters had their ashes buried beneath the five-foot boulder he had named "Remembrance Rock," which lay in the backyard of their home.<br/> <br/> Remembrance Rock was first published in a limited deluxe edition of 1000 copies (signed, numbered, two volumes), then published in a one volume trade edition, as here.<br/> <br/> Sandburg enjoyed great appeal as a poet, balladeer, and author in his day. After his death in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson observed that "Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America."<br/> <br/> SUPERIOR CONDITION for this hefty INSCRIBED volume with attractive dust wrapper. It has slight age-toning as is to be expected in this post-war paper. This is a thin darkening edge to the dust jacket which has small chips lost from the head & tail of the spine, minor rubbing<br/> <br/> A quick search for the dedicatee "Hariot Smith Erle," turns up one Hariot Smith, who was born in St Peters, Manitoba, Canada on 12 Jan 1877 and died in Selkirk, Manitoba, in 1968. But this Hariot married William Parissien. Just possibly their child married someone named "Earle." It would seem, therefore, that the dedicatee was an admirer rather than a well known personality.