Wind, The.
[Scarborough, Dorothy]. Anonymous. The Wind. New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1925.
8vo.; contemporary ownership signature on half-title; dark green cloth, stamped in yellow; dust-jacket; few nicks and one negligible tear, else fine and bright. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
First edition of this classic feminist text about a young pioneer woman in Texas and her struggle against loneliness, despair, and the forces of nature. Considered one of the great Texas novels, it was adapted for film by Frances Marion, in a version directed by Victor Sjøstrøm and starring Lillian Gish.
Dorothy Scarborough (1878-1935) is best-known for her work in the research and preservation of Southern folklore, her novels of the South and especially of life on a cotton plantation, and her contribution to supernatural short fiction. With a Master’s degree from Baylor University, Scarborough became, in 1896, “the first college teacher of journalism and short-story writing in the Southwest” at her alma mater. After advanced study at the University of Chicago and Oxford, she earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University, where she would teach until her death.
Among Scarborough’s other works are a book of poetry, Fugitive Verses (1912); her Columbia thesis, The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917); a collection of essays, From a Southern Porch (1919); In the Land of Cotton (1925), a novel set, predictably, in the South, as were Can’t Get a Red Bird (1929) and Stretch-Berry Smile (1932); The Story of Cotton (1933), her story of the South for younger readers. She edited Famous Modern Ghost Stories (1921) and Humorous Ghost Stories (1921), contributing her own introduction to each (her own short fiction was published in various periodicals and was occasionally anthologized, as well). On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs was published as written by Scarborough, “assisted by Ola Lee Gulledge” (1925), from her first-hand investigations of Negro folklore; a companion volume, A Song Catcher in Southern Mountains, resulted from a project sponsored by the Columbia University Council for Research in the Humanities. It was posthumously published by Columbia University Press in 1937.
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