PATCHEN, Kenneth.
Before the Brave.
FIRST EDITION — WITH THE PUBLISHER'S PREPUBLICATION REVIEW SLIP. New York: Random House, 1936.
Octavo. Original cream cloth printed in red over boards; in the original cream dust jacket printed in red, $2.00 price on the front flap, unclipped. Copyright 1936 by The Modern Library, Inc. (Random House's corporate imprint); manufactured at the Walpole Printing Office, Mount Vernon, New York. Dedication: "For Miriam." Laid in is the publisher's prepublication review slip, headed "Review Copy from Random House · 20 East 57 Street · N.Y.," giving the title, author, date of publication (January 27, 1936), and price ($2.00), and describing Patchen as a "proletarian poet" in the company of Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, and C. Day Lewis. Book very good, square and tight, the text block clean and the internal hinges sound; dust jacket complete and unclipped, the $2.00 price intact.
Patchen's first book — the debut of the Niles, Ohio steelworker's son who would become, alongside Kenneth Rexroth, a foundational figure of the San Francisco Renaissance and a major influence on the Beat Generation. Before the Brave is a politically charged Depression-era debut: angry, declamatory poems of social protest that call for collective awakening and rail against capitalism, war, and injustice, written in the urgent left-wing idiom of the 1930s. The presence of the review slip makes this a documented prepublication state, uncommon for the first book of a significant American poet.
SKU TO-2026-010
