[Rarebooks] FS: James Agee's copy of ELMER GANTRY while a student at Phillips Exeter Academy

[Charles Agvent]

[AGEE, James] LEWIS, Sinclair. ELMER GANTRY [James Agee's copy at 
Phillips Exeter Academy dated March 1927]. New York: Harcourt, Brace and 
Company, (1927). A later printing, ex-library copy with the bookplate of 
The Phillips Exeter Academy library on the front pastedown, stamped 
DISCARDED, of a book made into a film starring Burt Lancaster that won 
three Academy Awards. An undistinguished copy BUT for the fact that it 
belonged to James Agee with his SIGNATURE "J R Agee" dated March 1927 on 
the front free endpaper. This copy later belonged to Henry Darcy Curwen, 
of the Exeter English faculty, who signed his name below Agee's. In 
March 1927, Agee, at age 17, was in his "upper-middle" year (junior) at 
Exeter, an admirer of Sinclair Lewis and already committed to a literary 
career, submitting poems and stories to the Phillips Exeter Monthly. In 
one of his early letters to Father Flye (LETTERS OF JAMES AGEE TO FATHER 
FLYE, pages 27-28) dated Exeter 17 March 1927, Agee writes: "I've bought 
and read Elmer Gantry, the Lewis satire on religion. It's very 
disappointing, although excellent in spots. He's turning rancid." 
Reflecting his own psychological unease at the time, Agee soon expands 
this somewhat in one of his earliest published critical articles, a 
review of ELMER GANTRY in the Phillips Exeter Monthly 31 (May 1927): "It 
is one gigantic crescendo of walloping filthiness, and I have the 
feeling that it carried Mr. Lewis before it, and left him stranded where 
not even himself can work his salvation." Early signed Agee material is 
uncommon, and the important resonance of this copy with his beginning 
literary efforts can hardly be exaggerated. Good copy, lacking the 
dustwrapper. An Agee rarity. (#013597)        $2,000.00

See images here:

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-- 
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