About this Item
"First Edition" stated. Jacket complete but shows some spider-webbing to corners. Not price-clipped; original $2.75 price showing. German-American psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, born Friedrich Ignatz Wertheimer (1895-1981) was a "progressive psychiatrist" who "treated" poor black patients at his Lafargue Clinic, opened 1946 in the basement of St. Philip's Church in Harlem and financed by voluntary donations. Additionally, in 1932 he accepted a senior staff position at the Bellevue "Mental Hygiene Clinic," at which all convicted felons from the New York Court of General Sessions received a psychiatric examination, intended to be used in sentencing. Wertham, who eventually became director of the insane asylum, remains best-known for his 1954 book "Seduction of the Innocent," and for his subsequent related testimony before the Kefauver anti-crime commission, in which he asserted that comic books featuring violence, re-animated corpses, and scantily-clad ladies caused youthful readers to become juvenile delinquents. The threat of censorship following his inflammatory charges led directly to the creation of the supposedly voluntary "Comics Code," which in turn led to the eradication of most "EC Comics" titles and the subsequent dominance of their dumbed-down "DC" rivals, full of "sanitized super-heroes," the code having banned not only violent or disturbing images but also specific words and concepts ("terror," "zombies") while dictating that criminals must always be seen to be punished. Demonstrating that psychiatrists in general may be as much in need of help as their "patients," Wertham testified that he found images of female nudity concealed in drawings of muscles and tree bark, that Batman and Robin were homosexual lovers, and that he knew comics caused delinquency because 95 percent of children in reform schools read comic books. (Thank goodness he didn't catch any of them reading "Silent Spring" or "Rules for Radicals"!) After Wertham's manuscript collection at the Library of Congress was unsealed in 2010, Carol Tilley, University of Illinois librarian and professor of Information Science, investigated his research and found his conclusions to be largely made-up hokum. In 2012, Tilley wrote "Wertham manipulated, overstated, compromised, and fabricated evidence -- especially that evidence he attributed to personal clinical research with young people -- for rhetorical gain." Here, Wertham details the non-fiction case (albeit with names changed) of a 17-year-old Italian-American youth from New York's tenements who murdered his own mother. Includes lengthy autobiographical passages attributed to the young killer. This copy is Inscribed in Wertham's hand to the otherwise blank FFE "To Artie Shaw with unbounded respect & admiration -- / Your old pal, / Friede W." (including the "i" from the original German spelling.) Artie Shaw (born Arthur Jacob Arshawsky, 1910-2004) was of course the American clarinetist, composer, and band leader, who also wrote published fiction and non-fiction ("The Trouble With Cinderella.") Widely regarded as "one of jazz's finest clarinetists," Shaw led one of the most popular big bands in the late 1930s and early 1940s, being best known for his breakthrough 1938 recording of Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine." Shaw signed Billie Holiday as his band's vocalist in 1938, becoming the first white band leader to hire a full-time black female singer to tour the segregated South. After recording "Any Old Time," however, Holiday left the band due to hostility from audiences in the South, as well as from music company executives. Shaw was famously married eight times (though never to Lena Horne), including to Lana Turner (1940), Ava Gardner (1945-46), and "Forever Amber" author Kathleen Winsor (1946-48; annulled.) How he and Dr. Wertham came to be "pals" we do not know. Books signed by the intriguing (if somewhat odd) Dr. Wertham are uncommon. 270 pp. including Index. Reduced from $1,000. Seller Inventory # 009299
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Bibliographic Details
Title: Dark Legend (SIGNED TO BAND LEADER ARTIE ...
Publisher: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York
Publication Date: 1941
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Good
Signed: Inscribed by Author(s)
