Sinclair Upton Eugene Lyons (2 results)

Hardcover. 63p., original red boards, ex-library with bookplate and withdrawn stamp on front pastedown endpaper and card pocket on rear pastedown endpaper. No dj. *Ahouse B25, First or early printing, no priority established.

[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.