Birthright: A Novel

STRIBLING, T. S.

Birthright: A Novel.

FIRST EDITION. New York: The Century Co., 1922.

8vo. 309 pp. Illustrated by F. Luis Mora. Original red cloth, lettered in black on the front board and spine. Dedicated "To my mother Amelia Waits Stribling." Near fine, with slight fading to the spine and a small ink mark to the upper page edge; the cloth bright and the binding tight.

Set in the fictional town of Hooker's Bend, Tennessee, Birthright follows Peter Siner, a Harvard-educated young man who returns to his Southern hometown and confronts the entrenched prejudices and laws of the post-Reconstruction South. First serialized in Century Magazine in 1921 and issued in book form in 1922, the novel drew notice across the divides of its era and was twice adapted for the screen by the pioneering African American director Oscar Micheaux — as a silent film in 1924 and a sound film at the end of the 1930s. The 1924 silent is now lost.

The illustrations are by F. Luis Mora (1874–1940), the Uruguayan-born American painter and illustrator — the first Hispanic member of the National Academy of Design, a teacher at the Art Students League, and elder brother of the California artist Jo Mora. An attractive copy of an important novel of the American South.

SKU TO-2026-095