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The copyright page indicates this is the second printing (Feb 1936) of the first edition, which was first published November 1935. Text block in very good condition, with no marks, tears, or dog-ears. Book is tight. Pages are age-tanned, particularly the endpapers. Previous owner?s bookplate is pasted inside front cover and a short clipping about Rukeyser is pasted onto the first free endpaper. The tan cloth cover is in generally good condition but for a few small spots on the front and some discoloration in general. The title on the spine is in legible red lettering, but there is bumping top and bottom. There is some shelf rubbing along the top edge. XX This was Muriel Rukeyser?s first book. It contains three sections: Poem Out of Childhood (15 poems), Theory of Flight (17 poems), The Blood Is Justified (14 poems). XX Wikipedia entry: Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913 ? February 12, 1980) was an American poet and political activist, best known for her poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "exact generation". One of her most powerful pieces was a group of poems entitled The Book of the Dead(1938), documenting the details of the Hawk's Nest incident, an industrial disaster in which hundreds of miners died of silicosis. She attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, a private school in The Bronx, then Vassar College in Poughkeepsie. From 1930 to 32, she attended Columbia University. Her literary career began in 1935 when her book of poetry, Theory of Flight ? was chosen by the American poet Stephen Vincent Benét for publication in the Yale Younger Poets Series. Rukeyser was active in progressive politics throughout her life. At age 21, she covered the Scottsboro case in Alabama, then worked for the International Labor Defense, which handled the defendants' appeals. She wrote for the Daily Worker and a variety of publications including Decision (payne), Life & Letters Today (London) for which she covered the People's Olympiad (Olimpiada Popular, Barcelona), the Catalonian government's alternative to the Nazis' 1936 Berlin Olympics. While she was in Spain, the Spanish Civil War broke out, the basis of her Mediterranean. Most famously, she traveled to Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, to investigate the recurring silicosis among miners there, which resulted in her well-regarded poem sequence The Book of the Dead. During and after World War II, she gave a number of striking public lectures, published in her The Life of Poetry. For much of her life, she taught university classes and led workshops, but she never became a career academic.
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