Eugene Lyons Trans (1 results)

[Second Edition - see note below]. Octavo (23cm). Staple-bound, printed wrappers; 24pp; frontispiece portrait. Partial split to wrappers at bound edge; light soil, with expected toning to text; Very Good. Vanzetti's brief autobiographical statement, penned while imprisoned at Charlestown State Prison following his conviction, with fellow anarchist Nicola Sacco, for a 1920 armed robbery in Braintree, Massachusetts. The prosecution, though marred by countless procedural blunders and dubious testimony, nonetheless resulted in Sacco & Vanzetti's execution by electric chair in 1927. The current work, in which Vanzetti goes to some lengths to portray himself as a simple (but thoughtful) fishmonger-immigrant, was doubtless commissioned by the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee as a means to humanize the defendant; the article was widely circulated in left-wing and labor newspapers of the period. Of the pamphlet version of the text, at least two versions exist: one dated 1923, without Upton Sinclair's four-page "Appreciation" and Alice Stone Blackwell's foreword dated July, 1923, cover price 15 cents; and this 1924 edition, in which Sinclair's essay appears and Blackwell's foreword reappears, textually identical but redated August, 1924, cover price 10 cents. A Yiddish-language edition also appeared in 1923, but Vanzetti's original Italian text doesn't appear to have found its way into print until much later - we find this strange, as there was certainly a large-enough left-wing Italian readership to have warranted such an edition. All editions are scarce in commerce.…