[SHANGHAI MISSION IMPRINT] Selected poems of Paul DeWitt Twinem : special days, student days, soldier days, missionary days, courtship days. by TWINEM, Paul DeWitt (1894-1923)

Cover title: Poems by Paul DeWitt Twinem : Printed in Memoriam. Shanghai : printed by The Presbyterian Mission Press [for Mary Dorothy Fine Twinem], 1929. Octavo (20 x 135 mm), original purple silk over boards, upper board with title in English and Chinese in gilt; frontispiece half-tone photographic portrait of poet and missionary Paul deWitt Twinem, pp [8], 98, printed on Chinese bamboo paper on double leaves in oriental style; a fine copy. Paul DeWitt Twinem was born in Harrisville, Ohio, in 1894. In May 1922, while on the academic staff at the University of Nanking, he married Mary Dorothy Fine (b. 1895 in Trenton, New Jersey), an American Presbyetrian missionary based at Huaiyuan, in Anhui Province. Twinem himself joined the Presbyterian Mission, but only a few months later he died suddenly on 23 September, 1923, leaving Mary a young widow. Mary would spend the next few decades in China as a teacher at the University of Nanking, and she became a Chinese citizen. She was forced to leave Nanjing when the Imperial Japanese Army occupied the city in 1937, but managed to survive the Nanjing Massacre. After the Japanese entry into the Second World War she moved to Chongqing, returning to Nanjing only at the end of 1945. In 1949 she fled the Chinese Communist Revolution and settled in Taiwan. Rare. OCLC locates only 4 copies: Union Presbyterian Seminary (William Smith Morton Library); Princeton Theological Seminary; Yale University Library; Brown University Library.