Margaret Sanger Story, The and The Fight for Birth Control.
Inscribed
[Sanger, Margaret]. Lader, Lawrence. The Margaret Sanger Story and The Fight For Birth Control. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1955.
8vo.; front and rear paste-downs, endpapers, decorated with photomontage of Sanger at different points in her career; few pages lightly darkened towards edge; half-title heavily offset, due to insertion of loose newspaper clipping by a previous owner; previous owner’s blind library stamp on lower corner of title page; royal blue cloth, stamped in gilt; tips lightly bumped; white, blue and black dust-jacket, lightly worn but wholly intact, the rear with a lovely photo of a mature Sanger.
First edition of the first “biography” of Sanger, edited by her. A presentation copy, inscribed: To Mr. & Mrs. Ward J. Sharbach, a pioneer of pioneers in Minneapolis. My gratitude & appreciation. Margaret Sanger. March 24 1955. The recipients, obviously supporters of the birth control movement, were perhaps officials at one of the three Minneapolis-based Planned Parenthood offices listed in the biography’s appendix.
Sanger was living in Arizona in near retirement when she first encountered Lawrence Lader. Lader, a young Harvard-educated New York-based freelance journalist, flew to Sanger’s side in an attempt to win her cooperation with his forthcoming work, a scholarly biography of America’s best-known birth control advocate. Lader’s trip was a success: Sanger granted him permission, and he devoted the better part of 1953 through 1955 to the project, much of it spent in Tuscon with Sanger. The biographer and his subject became inseparably close, so much so that Lader (who “couldn’t help being swept up by [Sanger’s] powerful drive and feeling”) would later fondly recall the lazy afternoons and evenings during which Sanger, “her eyes sparkling and her head half-cocked...[would] captivate him for hours at a sitting with intricately woven and often very funny tales of her dramatic past” (Chesler, pp. 428-9). So heavy was Sanger’s hand throughout this project that she even personally edited Lander’s final manuscript (Chesler, p. 16).
Unsurprisingly, this unconventionally close working relationship between biographer and subject resulted in a laudatory, quite unobjective account of a genuinely commendable figure; even Sanger herself conceded that the book portrayed her as an embarrassing mush of “Joan of Arc and Florence Nightingale” (qtd. in Chesler, p. 429).
Inscriptions from Sanger are not at all common, particularly those dating from late in her career. (This book was published and inscribed in 1955; the book’s recipients have penned a short tribute beneath Sanger’s signature which states, correctly, that “Margaret Sanger died September 6, 1966 at age of 83 in Tucson Arizona”). Loosely inserted into the volume is a newspaper clipping describing Sanger’s last days in Tucson.
(#4849)
Print Inquire
