1939 First Edition - The YEARLING by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings illustrated by N. C. WYETH.
(description)
Author: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. (N. C. Wyeth, illustrator).
Title: THE YEARLING with pictures by N. C. Wyeth.
Publisher: New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1939. First N.C. Wyeth illustrated edition. The Pulitzer Prize-winning classic. Scribner seal and letter "A" on copyright page.
Language: Text in English.
Size: 9 " X 6 ".
Pages: viii-400 pages.
Binding: Attractive and near fine half morocco leather binding finely bound, probably for Brentano's Booksellers (hinges fine) under a protective removable mylar cover. Upper edge gilt. A very beautiful binding!
Content: Near fine content (bright, tight, and clean - as shown).
Illustrations: Complete with the illustrated title page, the beautifully illustrated endpapers (bound in after the marbled endpapers), and all the 14 wonderful full-page color illustrations by N. C. Wyeth.
The book: Attractive and near fine First N.C. Wyeth illustrated edition from the collection of Jan Stanley Mostowski (1915-2011). He designed the window displays at Brentano's famous bookstore on Fifth Avenue for many years. He thereby became acquainted with some of the most notable authors of his day and amassed an impressive collection of signed first editions. His heirs sold his library at auction in 2012, however much of the original collection was not included, having been destroyed by a flood several decades ago...
The Yearling is a novel by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings published in March 1938. It was the main selection of the Book of the Month Club in April 1938. It was the best-selling novel in America in 1938 and the seventh-best in 1939. It sold over 250,000 copies in 1938. It has been translated into Spanish, Chinese, French, Japanese, German, Italian, Russian and 22 other languages. It won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel.
Rawlings's editor was Maxwell Perkins, who also worked with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and other literary luminaries. She had submitted several projects to Perkins for his review, and he rejected them all. He advised her to write about what she knew from her own life, and The Yearling was the result.
The illustrator: Newell Convers Wyeth (October 22, 1882 – October 19, 1945), known as N. C. Wyeth, was an American artist and illustrator. He was the pupil of artist Howard Pyle and became one of America's greatest illustrators. During his lifetime, Wyeth created more than 3,000 paintings and illustrated 112 books — 25 of them for Scribner's, the Scribner Classics, which is the body of work for which he is best known. The first of these, Treasure Island, was one of his masterpieces and the proceeds paid for his studio. Wyeth was a realist painter at a time when the camera and photography began to compete with his craft. Sometimes seen as melodramatic, his illustrations were designed to be understood quickly. Wyeth, who was both a painter and an illustrator, understood the difference, and said in 1908, "Painting and illustration cannot be mixed—one cannot merge from one into the other."
He is the father of Andrew Wyeth and the grandfather of Jamie Wyeth, both well-known American painters.
The author: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (August 8, 1896 – December 14, 1953) was an American author who lived in rural Florida and wrote novels with rural themes and settings. Her best-known work, The Yearling, about a boy who adopts an orphaned fawn, won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1939 and was later made into a movie of the same name. The book was written long before the concept of young adult fiction but is now commonly included in teen-reading lists.