Record of an Obscure Man.
Putman, Mary Lowell. Record of an Obscure Man. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1861.
4to.; red paper-covered boards; quarter-morocco spine; t.e.g.; panels rubbed; tips bumped; spine rubbed and slightly chipped; else a fine copy.
First edition of Putman’s extremely rare first book; limited to 50 large-paper copies; perhaps a suppressed copy with publisher’s or author’s annotations on preliminary and dedication pages; published anonymously. Narrated by a friend of Edward Colvil, a New England farmer and poet who spent considerable time in the South at the pinnacle of slavery, Record is one of a series of four early books that examines the effects of slavery on African culture and explores possible alternatives to slavery.
Mary Traill Spence Lowell Putman (1810-1898), American author and abolitionist, was the daughter of Rev. Charles Lowell, minister of the West Church in Boston for more than forty years, and the elder sister of James Russell Lowell, author, teacher, public servant, and foremost American man of letters in his time. In 1832, she married Samual R. Putnam, a merchant of Boston, and resided for several years in Poland and Hungary. There she garnered material for her papers on Polish and Hungarian literature, which were published in the North American Review; her papers on the Hungarian History appeared in the Christian Examiner. Putman published her first longer work, a translation from Swedish of Fredrika Bremer’s The Bondsmaid, in 1844. From 1850-1857 she relocated to France and Germany, before returning to America to take up a prominent position in the abolitionist movement, which she arduously supported through her writings.
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