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Claude McKay photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1941, the year he wrote Amiable With Big Teeth.
Claude McKay photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1941, the year he wrote Amiable With Big Teeth.

Recent Discoveries: "New" Works by Proust, Whitman, Fitzgerald, and more

Monday, June 19, 2017

Newly published “lost” works from well-known authors have been making regular appearances in book review pages—and on the Library’s new books lists—recently. Here is a quick round-up of some notable publications.

F. Scott Fitzgerald | I’d Die for You and Other Lost Stories (edited by Anne Margaret Daniel)

I’d Die For You makes available the last known unpublished and uncollected short stories by Fitzgerald. A few of the eighteen stories were discovered only recently in libraries and private collections, including those of Fitzgerald’s family. Stories in I’d Die for You range from throughout Fitzgerald’s short writing life, but many were written during the Depression in the mountains of North Carolina where Zelda was being treated (at a dear cost) for schizophrenia. Fitzgerald had a talent for dashing off the type of stories the slick magazines wanted for a quick (and large) paycheck, but during the depths of the Depression the slicks were quickly running out of money, too. Some of these stories were accepted for publication by magazines just before folding from lack of funds, leaving Fitzgerald’s work to languish unpublished until now. The New York Times recently published a full review of I’d Die for You

Marcel Proust | Letters to his Neighbor (translated by Lydia Davis)

Of all the books here, this collection of recently discovered letters written by Marcel Proust between 1908 and 1916 may be the most intriguing. Essentially, these letters are noise complaints, written

to an artist named Marie Williams and her husband, an American dentist named Charles, who had moved into Proust’s building and quickly disrupted the writer's routines of work and rest. Proust, however, apparently imbued the letters with the singular qualities of his prose, and reviewers have described them as digressive, witty, ironic, and beautifully poetic. They are also exceptionally polite and kind—pleas for silence are often accompanied by gifts, including four pheasants. Lydia Davis previously translated Swann’s Way in 2002. Letters to his Neighbor will be published on August 22, 2017. 

Walt Whitman | Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: An Auto-Biography; In Which the Reader Will Find Some Familiar Characters

Walt Whitman's Guide to Manly Health & Training

Both of these lost Whitman works were discovered by Zachary Turpin, a graduate student at the University of Houston, and published in 2017. The first, a 36,000-word novella, was originally published pseudonymously in six parts in a New York newspaper in 1852. Turpin describes the book as “[Dickensian]…it's also a sentimental novel; it's also city mystery novel. It's multifaceted, let's put it that way." It was previously thought—by the few who even knew about it—that Whitman had only published one work of fiction, the 1842 temperance novel set in Antebellum New York called Franklin Evans; or, The Inebriate: a Tale of the Times. Although largely forgotten, this was actually Whitman’s most popular work during his lifetime, selling about 20,000 copies.  (Franklin Evans got a mention in my 2015 blog post about one-novel authors.) Read more about Jack Engle’s adventures in this recent New Yorker piece. 

2017 also saw the publication of Walt Whitman's Guide to Manly Health & Training. This entertaining compendium of Whitman’s advice for those committed to the pursuit of testosterone-based vim and vigor was originally released in 1858 as a thirteen-part essay series in the New York Atlas (and was also published under a pseudonym). These lost works sit three years to either side of the 1855 publication of Leaves of Grass and, although obviously very different than the poems for which he is famous, the literary cognoscenti have noted some qualities shared with his poetry. 

Claude McKay | Amiable With Big Teeth 

McKay may not be as well-known as the other authors here, but he was an important influence on the Harlem Renaissance. Amiable With Big Teeth was written in 1941, and was discovered by a graduate student in 2009 in the archives at Columbia University. The tensions among different groups within the left wing Harlem intelligentsia, including Black Nationalists and Communists, are at the center of this novel, particularly during their efforts to organize support for the liberation of fascist-controlled Ethiopia. Critics have praised the novel as a vivid portrait of Harlem and the evolution of the collective African-American political consciousness at this time.

Jennifer Wilson has written a piece on the novel for the Atlantic that can be read here and the New York Review of Books recently featured this interesting essay about McKay and Amiable With Big Teeth by Daryl Pinckney. 

Shirley Jackson | Let Me Tell You (edited by Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt) 

More than forty of the fifty-six pieces collected in Let Me Tell You have never been published before. Two of Jackson’s children co-edited this volume, drawn from Jackson's vast archive of papers at the Library of Congress. Read more about it in Joyce Carol Oates’ review in the New York Review of Books. 

Alexandre Dumas | Red Sphinx (edited and translated by Lawrence Ellsworth)

The Red Sphinx is not technically a “lost” work, but it was virtually unknown to English readers prior to this 2017 publication. Alexander Dumas wrote The Red Sphinx near the end of his career, intending it to be a direct sequel to The Three Musketeers that begins twenty days after the narrative of that novel ends. Seventy-five chapters were written for serial publication, but the novel was never quite finished, languishing for almost a century before its first book publication in France in 1946. While Dumas never completed the book, he had earlier written a separate novella, The Dove, that recounted the final adventures of various characters from The Three Musketeers. This new publication contains for the first time The Red Sphinx and The Dove in one cohesive narrative, making a complete sequel to The Three Musketeers. Read Michael Dirda's review in the Washington Post here. 

 

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