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Octavo, [18.75cm/7.5inches], Rebound in full gilt-embossed burgundy-coloured cloth sans dust jacket, pp.227. Please feel free to inquire as to particulars and/or additional photographs. . S. S. Van Dine is the pseudonym used by American art critic Willard Huntington Wright (1888 1939) when he wrote detective novels. His younger brother, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, became a respected painter, one of the first American abstract artists, and co-founder (with Morgan Russell) of the school of modern art known as "Synchromism". Willard and Stanton were raised in Santa Monica, California, where their father owned a hotel. Willard, a largely self-taught writer, attended St. Vincent College, Pomona College, and Harvard University without graduating. Wright's energies were devoted to numerous projects, reflecting his wide range of interests. His book What Nietzsche Taught appeared in 1915. An attempt to popularize the German philosopher with skeptical American audiences, it described and commented on all of Nietzsche's books and provided quotations from each work. Wright continued to write short stories in this period; in 2012 Brooks Hefner revealed heretofore unknown short stories that featured an intellectual criminal, written by Wright under a pseudonym several years before his adoption of the Van Dine pseudonym. Wright was, however, most respected in intellectual circles for his writing about art. In Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning (secretly co-authored in 1915 with his brother Stanton), he surveyed the important art movements of the last hundred years from Manet to Cubism, praised the largely unknown work of Cézanne, and predicted a coming era in which an art of color abstraction would replace realism. Admired by people like Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe, Wright became under his brother's tutelage one of the most progressive (and belligerently opinionated) art critics of the time and helped to organize several shows, including the "Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters", that brought the most advanced new painters to the attention of audiences on both coasts. He also published a work of aesthetic philosophy, The Creative Will (1916), that O'Keeffe and William Faulkner both regarded as a meaningful influence on their thinking about artistic identity. On April 11, 1939, at age 50, Wright died in New York of a heart condition exacerbated by excessive drinking, a year after the publication of an unpopular experimental novel that incorporated one of the biggest stars in radio comedy, The Gracie Allen Murder Case. He left behind a complete novelette-length story that was intended as a film vehicle for Sonja Henie and was published posthumously as The Winter Murder Case. Max Perkins generously referred to Wright at the time of Wright's death as a "gallant, gentle man" who had been tormented by the pressures of a market-driven age. His portrait, painted by his brother in 1914, hangs in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. In exceptionally good condition. Seller Inventory # 25834
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Bibliographic Details
Title: The Gracie Allen Murder Case A Philo Vance ...
Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, New York
Publication Date: 1938
Binding: Hardcover
Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
Edition: First Edition (Rebound).
