AMERICAN WRITING 1942. An Anthology and Yearbook of the American Non-Commercial Magazine

Prairie City: The Press of James A. Decker, (1942). First edition. Collects stories and poems from 1941 appearances in "little" magazines which Swallows describes in his introduction as often short-lived and with low circulations but important for their embrace of new authors and experimental fiction. Contains a number of first book appearances by well-know authors such as the short story "Goodwood Comes Back" by Robert Penn Warren and poetry by John Berryman, Kenneth Fearing, Randall Jarrell, Weldon Kees, Stanley Kunitz, Josephine Miles, Muriel Rukeyser, Ann Stanford, et al. 8vo dark-blue pebbled cloth stamped in green. Very good with light wear to spine ends and lettering a little faded but still readable. 1986 TYPED LETTER SIGNED FROM BURTON WEISS on Serendipity Books letterhead to collector Allen Mears laid in identifying the unsigned INSCRIPTION ON FRONT ENDPAPER as being from Alan Swallows, chatting about the Book Club of California's weekly Monday-evening open houses where "the bar is free and unlimited, as is the conversation," and speculating the book may not have been issued in a dust jacket due to the publisher Decker's "chicanery, general weirdness, and warehouse fire." Uncommon.