Remembrance Rock.

SANDBURG, Carl.

$475.00

Item Number: 127433

New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1948.

First trade edition of Sandburg’s self-described “epic, weaving the mystery of the American Dream with the costly toil and bloody struggles that have gone to keep alive and carry further that Dream.” Octavo, bound in three quarter morocco with gilt titles and tooling to the spine in six compartments within raised gilt bands, marbled endpapers, top edge gilt. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the third free endpaper, “Bill Safire with respect and good wishes Carl Sandburg.” The recipient, William Safire, was an important American author, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter. He joined Nixon’s campaign in the 1960 Presidential race, and again in 1968. Following Nixon’s 1968 victory, Safire served as a presidential speechwriter for both Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew. He was a frequent guest on Meet The Press, describing himself as the voice of “libertarian conservatives” and authored several political columns, most notably his weekly column “On Language” which appeared in The New York Times Magazine from 1979 until the month of his death in 2009. He authored two books on grammar and linguistics: The New Language of Politics (1968) and what Zimmer called Safire’s “magnum opus,” Safire’s Political Dictionary. Safire later served as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board from 1995 to 2004 and in 2006 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush. In very good condition. With Safire’s bookplate to the pastedown.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had announced, in 1941, a film American Cavalcade that was to star Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, playing husband-and-wife teams from different periods of American history. The original treatment was rejected, and in 1943, the studio arranged with Sandburg to use the idea and then pre-purchased the film rights. Charles Poore noted in his review of the work, "It is no great shakes as a novel and quite a great shakes as a book on the American destiny. Its faults and its excellences are all on what you might call a quietly stupendous scale... In the end, of course, he succeeds only in saying in half a million words or so what Lincoln suggested in the last sentence of the Gettysburg Address. But that's enough, isn't it?" Perry Miller remarked, "[It] is not really a novel; it is the chant of an antique Bard who fills out the beat with stereotypes and repetitions."