BANJO: A Story without a Plot
Exceptional first edition of the major Harlem Renaissance novel — along with McKay's own first edition copy, signed and dated "Paris 1929," of POMES PENYEACH by James Joyce.
Fine in near fine jacket.
Price: $6,500.00
BANJO: A Story without a Plot
The story of an African American musician along the Marseille coastline, BANJO is "a sketch of the black personality by a black writer and it pans across a whole range of blackness: West Africans, West Indians, North Americans and the mulattos of the French West Indies" (Jacqueline Kaye, 165). According to Margaret Perry, McKay's "disillusionment with the Harlem Renaissance" (119) comes through in BANJO via the contrast between the two main characters, all itself against a backdrop of French colonialism.
This copy is accompanied by McKay's copy of POMES PENYEACH, a short poetry chapbook published by Shakespeare and Company only a couple years earlier. McKay had moved to France in the early '20s and spent some time in the modernist ex-pat circles of Paris; his first novel, HOME TO HARLEM, references Joyce via his aspiring-writer character, Ray: "During the war he had been startled by James Joyce in The Little Review." Ray "[d]reams of making something with words" after his modernist readings.
A bright copy, very scarce in such a beautiful dust jacket.
Read more: Blockson Collection, item 4736; Margaret Perry, The Harlem Renaissance: An Annotated Bibliography, item 377; Kaye, "Claude McKay's 'Banjo'" in Présence Africaine Nouvelle série, No. 73 (1er TRIMESTRE 1970); Slocum, Bibliography of James Joyce, 24.
The Object
First printing. New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1929. 7.5'' x 5''. Original black cloth spine with blue and red patterned paper boards. In original unclipped ($2.50) red pictorial dust jacket designed by Aaron Douglas. Red topstain, patterned endpapers. [8], 326, [2] pages. Jacket unusually bright and clean, with a small closed tear and tiny spot of loss to rear panel, tiny archival repairs to verso. Binding with only a touch of wear. Hinges firm, spine gilt bright. WITH: POMES PENYEACH, Shakespeare and Company, 1927. Early rebound in nondescript black cloth, partly detached at gutter, good. Signed "Claude McKay / Paris 1929" to front endpaper. Housed in custom black cloth clamshell box with separate compartment for the Joyce.
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