(Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating bac...)
Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
(Very Good in Good jacket; see scans and description. New ...)
Very Good in Good jacket; see scans and description. New York: MacMillan, 1928. First Edition. Octavo, 408 pp. Orange and black illustrated jacket. Black cloth boards, green imprinting on spine and front. A bit of dirt on the title page and copyright page, faint offsets at end papers. A handsome VG book, with modest corner and spine-end bumping and one joint crack at title page (nowhere else), in a fair to good jacket which is substantially roughed up at the perimeter and lacks the front flap. See scans. A true first edition in jacket of Bernard DeVoto's The House of Sun-Goes-Down, notable as one of the earliest western novels to depart front the cowboy-and-indian stereotype and present a more realistic story. Please review scans. L57
Bernard Augustine DeVoto was an American historian, journalist, and educator. The main topic of his writings was the history of the American W.
Background
Bernard Augustine DeVoto was born on January 11, 1897, in Ogden, Utah. He was the only child of Florian Bernard DeVoto, an Italian Catholic, and Rhoda Dye DeVoto, daughter of a Mormon farmer. The life of his maternal grandfather, Samuel Dye, who had come to the United States as a Mormon convert from England in 1856, has been affectionately chronicled by DeVoto in his memoir "The Life of Jonathan Dyer. " Precocious and literary, DeVoto grew up at odds with the frontier, predominantly Mormon town of Ogden. Although he later renounced all religious belief, he was reared as a Catholic; from his father he acquired an anti-Mormon bias that was little tempered by his affection for his mother's family, and which colored his early writings.
Education
After graduating from Ogden High School in 1914, DeVoto spent one unsatisfactory year at the University of Utah before transferring to Harvard, where Le Baron R. Briggs, Charles Townsend Copeland, and Byron Hurlbut encouraged his ambition to be a writer. A period in the infantry in World War I interrupted his studies, but he returned to Harvard, where he received a B. A. degree in 1920
Career
DeVoto returned to Ogden to work on a novel, but suffered the first of a series of nervous breakdowns. From November 1921 to June 1922, he taught history at North Junior High School, and was only rescued from an unhappy torpor when Dean Briggs found him an instructorship in English at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
DeVoto's literary career began with a novel, The Crooked Mile (1924), which excoriated a western town very similar to Ogden. It was followed by The Chariot of Fire (1926), which dealt with a frontier prophet not unlike Joseph Smith. In 1926 he began a series of contentious essays in the American Mercury, including one, "Utah, " which was deeply resented in his home state. By September 1927, he felt confident enough as an author to resign his position at Northwestern and move to Cambridge, Massachussets, to write for his living. From that time on he was simultaneously a hack writer, essayist, editor, teacher, literary critic, and historian.
After 1929 DeVoto also taught writing and contemporary literature at Harvard. As editor of the Harvard Graduates' Magazine from 1930 to 1932, he turned a somnolent alumni journal into a vigorous and controversial periodical. He produced a stream of formula stories for Redbook, Collier's, and the Saturday Evening Post, and after 1939 concentrated this commercial effort upon a series of Collier's serials under the pseudonym John August. Four of these, Troubled Star (1939), Rain before Seven (1940), Advance Agent (1942), and The Woman in the Picture (1944), were also published as novels. During the same years he was also publishing serious novels under his own name: The House of Sun-Goes-Down (1928), We Accept with Pleasure (1934), and Mountain Time (1947). His essays in literary criticism and articles on conservation, civil liberties, and censorship continued to appear in a wide range of magazines, and selections of these were published in Forays and Rebuttals (1936), Minority Report (1940), and The Easy Chair (1955). In November 1935, DeVoto took over "The Easy Chair" in Harper's Magazine, the oldest column in American journalism, and over the next twenty years he made it into the most influential column of opinion of its time.
When he was not approved for advancement in the Harvard faculty in the spring of 1936, he accepted the editorship of the Saturday Review of Literature and moved to New York with the express intention of challenging the literary Left, with which he strongly disagreed. Two years later, when the Left and the Depression had proved too strong for him, he left the faltering Saturday Review to become curator of the Mark Twain papers. Thus freed from teaching and editing, he could devote himself to the study of the frontier, with which he had won his first major reputation when he had published, in 1932, his Mark Twain's America, a belligerent refutation of the theories Van Wyck Brooks had expressed in The Ordeal of Mark Twain. Out of the Mark Twain papers came a collection of Mark Twain's previously unpublished writings, Mark Twain in Eruption (1940), and Mark Twain at Work (1942). He eventually left the Twain papers in 1946.
In The Literary Fallacy (1944), DeVoto summarized his controversial views of twentieth-century American writing, but it was not as a literary critic that he accomplished his finest work. After 1950, with the provocative and generally underrated World of Fiction, an examination of the subconscious origins of art, DeVoto set aside criticism to concentrate upon history and conservation. The Year of Decision: 1846 (1943) had established him as a historian with a notably lively and evocative style. Rather as a sideline during the western studies, DeVoto edited a shortened and very useful version of the Journals of Lewis and Clark (1953) and produced a brilliant and effective series of essays about the public domain and the threats to it from stockmen and loggers. These began in January 1947, and continued, many of them in "The Easy Chair, " until DeVoto's death. A selection of the conservation essays, under the heading "Treatise on a Function of Journalism, " is reprinted in the anthology The Easy Chair, published just before DeVoto died of a heart attack in New York City.
Wallace Stegner described Devoto as "flawed, brilliant, provocative, outrageous, . .. often wrong, often spectacularly right, always stimulating, sometimes infuriating, and never, never dull. "
Connections
DeVoto married one of his freshman students, Helen Avis MacVicar, on June 30, 1923. They had two sons.