Appalachee Red. Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee. Baby Sweet’s [The Muskhogean Trilogy].

ANDREWS, Raymond.

$1,100.00

Item Number: 122389

New York: The Dial Press, 1978, 1980, 1983.

First edition of each novel in Raymond Andrews’ famed yet elusive Muskhogean Trilogy. Octavo, three volumes, original half cloth, illustrations by Benny Andrews. Association copies, inscribed by the author in both volumes one and two to fellow author Bill Starr. Appalachee Red inscribed as follows, “For BILL, A pleasure having met you, Ray Andrews 9-24-88.” Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee inscribed as follows, “BILL, Thanks very much for the great reviews, All the Best Always Ray Andrews 9-24-88.” The recipient Bill Starr was an author and reviewer, who advanced Southern Literature, first as Book Review Editor for The State in Columbia, South Carolina for which he wrote hundreds of reviews for both emerging as well as established writers. Each volume is fine in near fine to fine dust jackets.

African American novelist Raymond Andrews, the son of Georgia sharecroppers, won the prestigious first James Baldwin Prize for his first novel, Appalachee Red. It became the anchor for his acclaimed Muskhogean Trilogy, which included Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee (1980) and Baby Sweet's (1983). "Andrews' unique style owes a great deal to the cadences of rural southern speech…there are echoes of the southern folk preacher, the streetwise badman… the folk wisdom of elderly Black women who pass on their knowledge to the younger African American girls, and the rhythms of jazz and blues music." This outstanding trilogy about the fictional Georgia county of Muskhogean "is imbibed with Andrews' characteristic knack for storytelling" and vibrant characters who "find their own voices through his exuberant prose… these are real people, living their lives with no apologies" (Oxford Companion to African American Literature, 17-18). On publication Appalachee Red won quick praise as a "big and startling work… its nearest affinities are with Black oral tradition, Faulkner and Twain" (Chicago Tribune), and its successor, Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee, was hailed as the work of "an extraordinary writer—a true and absolutely original American voice" (Publishers Weekly). The trilogy's concluding novel, Baby Sweet's, was also singled out by critics who called it "a pleasure to read… a novel chanted to achieve the feeling of blues." Throughout the triology, Andrews' prose is "steeped in the sensibility of the tall tale, of oral storytelling" (New York Times).