EVENING IN SPRING

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1941. First edition. Damp stain to lower rear cover and rear free end paper, some loss to gilt of spine lettering, a very good copy in very good dust jacket with damp stain mainy to verso of rear panel and spine panel with some show through. (19916). Octavo, pp. [1-12] [1-2] 3-308, original black cloth, front and spine stamped in gold and blue, top edge stained dark blue, A novel in the author's "Sac Prarie Saga," set in the Sauk City/Prarie du Sac area of Wisconsin. "This work Derleth considered among his finest. What The Milwaukee Journal called "this beautiful little love story," is an autobiographical novel of first love beset by small town religious bigotry. The work received critical praise: The New Yorker considered it a story told "with tenderness and charm," while the Chicago Tribune concluded: "It's as though he turned back the pages of an old diary and told, with rekindled emotion, of the pangs of pain and the sharp, clear sweetness of a boy's first love." Helen Constance White, wrote in The Capital Times that it was "...the best articulated, the most fully disciplined of his stories." - D'Ambrosio, A WEE BIT OF WISCONSIN, pp. 33-34.