Red Ribbon on a White Horse.
Yezierska, Anzia. Red Ribbon on a White Horse. With an introduction by W.H. Auden. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950.
8vo.; red cloth, with a white horse stamped on the cover; black cloth spine, stamped in white; dust-jacket; lightly rubbed; gentle wear to extremities.
First edition of Yezierska’s final novel, a fictionalized autobiography with an introduction by W.H. Auden. Described as “well-made and subtle” by Jules Chametzky, it depicts scenes from her stay in Hollywood, her relationship with Dewey (thinly veiled by a pseudonym), “palmy Algonquin days, hard times, and the Works Progress Administration Writers’ Project,” where “one of her coworkers was Richard Wright—and finally an interlude in Vermont in search of a simple and emotionally fulfilling life.” These episodes and more, he states, “convince that who touches this book touches a person” (NAW MP 754). Auden calls the work “an account of her efforts to discard fantastic desires and find real ones, both material and spiritual,” a task he examines in the context of the life of the immigrant urban poor of the United States: “Was their new condition an improvement on their former one? … in no European country, it seems, were the very poor treated with such a total disregard of their human rights…. ‘Better to die there than to live here,’” he quotes one new American. Through her writing, Yezierska hoped to challenge and overcome her difficult circumstances, believing that “by writing out what I don’t know and can’t understand, it would stop hurting me.”
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