Ramona: A Story

Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884. First edition. First edition. [ii], 490, [4, ads] pp. Bound in publisher's green cloth stamped in gilt and black. Very Good, light wear to cloth, hinge at front starting, slight dampstaining to fore-edge, a little waviness to terminals, thumbsoiling. Bookplate of Irvin L. Edelstein on front paste-down. With four postcards illustrating scenes from the novel laid in; one mailed with cancelled stamp and handwritten message.

The Zamorano Eighty reflects that the book is "an exceedingly important California book for two reasons. A popular book, it spread the fame of California and no doubt inspired a considerable number of people to migrate here... And, second, by exposing the abuses to which Southern California Indians were subjected, it resulted in numerous wholesale reforms in the Administration of Indian affairs...." BAL 10456; Cowan p.307; Zamorano 80 #46; a Peter Parley to Penrod 'border-line selection'.

Helen Hunt Jackson was an activist dedicated to improving United States government treatment of Native Americans. She gained the widest public with her novel Ramona, dramatizing the ill treatment by the United States government of Native Americans in Southern California. Ramona achieved rapid success, although the public has responded to the novel more as a romantic love story than as a tract of political reform. Having had many editions, Ramona is still in print. It was adapted as a play and for three films. Encouraged by the popularity of her book, Jackson planned to write a children's story about Indian issues, but less than a year after the publication of Ramona, she died of cancer in San Francisco, California. She was a classmate of the poet Emily Dickinson, also from Amherst. The two corresponded for much of their lives, although few of their letters have survived. .