The Greenwood Hat Being a Memoir of James Anon [1885-1887]

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Very Good+ in Very Good- dust jacket. 1938. 1st American Edition; 1st Printing. Hardcover. B&W Illustrations; This book is in Very Good+ condition and has a Very Good- dust jacket. The book and its contents are in mostly clean, bright condition. The spine ends and corners of the book covers have some light bumping. The text pages are clean and bright. There is a previous owner's inked name on the front endpaper. The dust jacket has several edge tears, nicks and some spots of rubbing, and a couple of small chips. "Following a job advertisement found by his sister in The Scotsman, he worked for a year and a half as a staff journalist on the Nottingham Journal. Back in Kirriemuir, he submitted a piece to the St. James's Gazette, a London newspaper, using his mother's stories about the town where she grew up (renamed "Thrums"). The editor "liked that Scotch thing" so well that Barrie ended up writing a series of these stories. They served as the basis for his first novels: Auld Licht Idylls (1888) , A Window in Thrums (1890) , and The Little Minister (1891). The stories depicted the "Auld Lichts", a strict religious sect to which his grandfather had once belonged. Modern literary criticism of these early works has been unfavourable, tending to disparage them as sentimental and nostalgic depictions of a parochial Scotland, far from the realities of the industrialised nineteenth century, seen as characteristic of what became known as the Kailyard School. Despite, or perhaps because of, this, they were popular enough at the time to establish Barrie as a successful writer. Following that success, he published Better Dead (1888) privately and at his own expense, but it failed to sell. His two "Tommy" novels, Sentimental Tommy (1896) and Tommy and Grizel (1900) , were about a boy and young man who clings to childish fantasy, with an unhappy ending. The late nineteenth century English novelist George Gissing read the former in November 1896 and wrote that he "thoroughly dislike[d it]". " (from Wikipedia) .