Hunting Big Game in the Eighties…
(Roosevelt, Eleanor, editor). Hunting Big Game in the Eighties: The Letters of Elliott Roosevelt Sportsman. New York: Scribner’s, 1932.
8vo.; frontispiece of Elliott Roosevelt with tissue overlay; blue paper-covered boards with ivory paper spine, stamped in gilt; tiny puncture at upper right; otherwise fine.
First edition, deluxe issue. Inscribed to her daughter: Anna from Mother.
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, her mother’s namesake, was born on May 3, 1906. (Eleanor’s five children, in order of birth, were: Anna Eleanor, James, Elliott, Franklin Delano Jr., and John Aspinwalt; there was also a son born soon after James who died in infancy.) In the late 1920s, Eleanor was concerned about her first child:
Anna was eighteen, unhappy at Cornell, where she never wanted to be, and still more unhappy at home, with all its tensions and undercurrents...she wanted “to get out,” and became engaged to Curtis Dall, a rather conventional and balding financier associated with Lehman Brothers. Then thirty, he seemed appealing to Anna above all for his apparent stability; but Eleanor was not so sure. “I don’t think she even thinks she’s serious but he is and I’m not sure she didn’t let herself get a bit further than she meant to be!” They were married in June 1926. (Cook, p. 330)
Six years later, in 1932, travelling with her family on FDR’s first “whistle-stop campaign train,” Anna met John Boettiger, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, with whom she fell in love. Within months of the trip, and soon after the publication of Hunting Big Game, Anna and John divorced their respective spouses and married each other.
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