TROPIC DEATH [Benjamin Brawley's Copy]

New York: Boni & Liveright, 1926. First Edition, Second Printing. Hardcover. Octavo, 109 pages. In Good condition, lacking dust jacket. Bound in publisher's black cloth, with yellow stamping. Boards show some general rubbing and wear, particularly along extremities.
Text block has webbing visible along both front and rear gutters, with yellow illustrated endpapers, and some scattered pencil marginalia and several passages underlined (presumably in Brawley's hand). Ownership signature of Benjamin Brawley to the front free end paper. Shelved in Case 2. Eric D. Walrond as an Afro-Caribbean writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance. He arrived in New York (after having lived in British New Guiana and Panama) in 1918, and soon began contributing to many of the prominent literary publications of the time: The Smart Set, The New Republic and Vanity Fair and Negro World. He was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction in both 1928 and 1929, and his work was widely praised. "Shortly after Tropic Death's publication in 1926, critic Benjamin Brawley referred to it as "the most important contribution made by a Negro to American letters since the appearance of [Paul Laurence] Dunbar's Lyrics of Lowly Life" ("Renaissance" 234)." [Imani D. Owens, MELUS, Volume 41, Issue 4, December 2016].



Benjamin Brawley was an American author and educator whose books include The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States (1918) and New Survey of English Literature (1925). He served as the first dean of Morehouse College from 1912 to 1920, taught at Shaw University, and was the chair of the English department at Howard University. 1363782. Shelved Dupont Bookstore.