DEAR VAGABONDS: The Adventures of Roy and Brownie Adams. by Hall, Gordon Langley [later known as Dawn Langley Simmons] - (1964).

New York: Tara Books, (1964)., (1964).. Good. - Octavo, 8-7/8 inches high by 5-3/4 inches wide. Rust brown boards titled in gilt on the spine, in a price-clipped dust wrapper. The dust jacket is rubbed & chipped with its spine faded. There is dampstaining to the inner flap of the jacket's front panel and to the jacket's rear panel. 94 pages, with black & white photographic illustrations. There is light offsetting & staining to the endpapers with dampstaining to the edges of the plates. Good.

First edition.

Signed by the author with both of her names on the title page: "Gordon Langley Hall / (Dawn Langley Simmons) / 1973".

An account of the adventurous travels of Veronica "Brownie" and Roy B. Adams in North America, Mexico, Samoa, Java, North Africa, Scandinavia and China in the first half of the 20th century.

Author Dawn Langley Simmons had one of the first sex-reassignment surgeries in the United States. Brought up in England at Sissinghurst Castle, home of Vita Sackville West and Harold Nicolson, she made her home in Charleston, South Carolina. She first surfaced there as wealthy antiques dealer Gordon Hall. In the late sixties she began living as a woman, claiming that she was misidentified as a boy in childhood and that she had given birth to a daughter. Compounding the shock to polite Charleston society, she proceeded to marry a black man, John-Paul Simmons, who was much her junior and who was allegedly the father of her child Natasha. Ostracised and forced to flee from the South, she moved to upstate New York, where she died in 2000. Dawn Simmons is the subject of a biography by Edward Ball, Peninsula of Lies: A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love.