A Boy's Will.
New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1915. First U.S. edition, first printing, first state. Hardcover. This is a quite respectably well-preserved American first edition, first state, of the author’s first published book. This April 1915 first printing of 750 copies came one month after the American edition of North of Boston (reversing the publication order of the British first editions). First state is confirmed by the misprint “Aind” on the final line of p. 14.
Condition is very good plus. The blue cloth binding is square and tight with sharp corners and bright gilt on the covers and spine. The binding shows modest shelf wear to spine ends and corners and minor blemishes and scuffs to the blue cloth. The contents are impressively clean, with no previous ownership marks, no spotting, no soiling, and only the slightest age-toning.
Iconic American poet Robert Lee Frost (1874-1963), the quintessential poetic voice of New England, was actually born in San Francisco and first published in England. When Frost was eleven, his newly widowed mother moved east to Salem, New Hampshire. There Frost found his poetic voice, infused by New England scenes and sensibilities. Promising as a student and writer, Frost nonetheless dropped out of both Dartmouth and Harvard, supporting himself and a young family by teaching and farming.
Ironically, a 1912 move to England with his wife and children – “the place to be poor and to write poems” – finally catalyzed his recognition as a noteworthy American poet. A Boy’s Will was completed in England and accepted for publication by David Nutt on 1 April 1913. “Yeats pronounced the poetry “the best written in America for some time” and Frost received “two extraordinary tributes in the Nation and the Chicago Dial and a superb review in the Academy.”
A convocation of critical recognition, introduction to other writers, and creative energy supported the English publication of Frost’s second book, North of Boston, in 1914, after which “Frost’s reputation as a leading poet had been firmly established in England, and Henry Holt of New York had agreed to publish his books in America.” Accolades met his return to America at the end of 1914 and by 1917 a move to Amherst “launched him on the twofold career he would lead for the rest of his life: teaching whatever “subjects” he pleased at a congenial college… and “barding around,” his term for “saying” poems in a conversational performance.”
By 1924 Frost won the first of his eventual four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry (1931, 1937, and 1943). Frost spent the final decade and a half of his life as “the most highly esteemed American poet of the twentieth century” with a host of academic and civic honors to his credit. Two years before his death he became the first poet to read in the program of a U.S. Presidential inauguration (Kennedy, January 1961).
References: Crane A2.1; ANB. Item #008596
Price: $650.00