Galena Guide

Small 4to. Rebound in red cloth with gilt front board lettering (with original stiff blue pictorial front wrapper bound in). 79pp. Frontispiece, illustrations, linoleum-block engravings, small color foldout map at rear. Very good. Binding rather edgeworn and a bit rubbed, mainly along spine; original front wrapper and text block quite nice and tight; foldout map at rear bears some discreet archival mends on verso; mild ex-library with very few markings. Tight and decent first edition of this Federal Writers' Project city guide, long thought to have been written anonymously by the then-obscure young writer Nelson Algren (1909-81), who went on to far greater fame as the ?Poet of the Chicago Slums,? author of ?The Man with the Golden Arm? (1949) and other classic Chicago fiction. One of the most desirable of the WPA city guides. The Richard Delson plates are simple but striking and powerful; the often-absent color map at rear is bright and handsome. And while Jerre Mangione's "The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers' Project 1935-1943 (1972) repeats Algren's exaggeration that he wrote the "Galena Guide," historian Richard F. Bales tackles this issue anew, relying on primary source material and close textual analysis in his essay "Who Wrote the Galena Guide?" (pp. 180-194 in his 2024 "Nelson Algren: His Life, Work and Colleagues") to persuasively settle the issue. He finds Algren's claim inaccurate and misleading, concluding that "Algren edited the the Guide, he even revised and rewrote the Guide." Deaccessioned from the library of the very city it celebrates. DYKES 81.…