Galena Guide
193752343Galena: City of Galena 1937. Paperback. 8vo. Stiff blue pictorial wrappers. 79pp. Frontispiece illustrations linoleum-block engravings small color foldout map at rear. Very good. Quite faint wear and age toning to outer wrappers only else internally tight and near fine. Nice first edition of this Federal Writers' Project city guide long thought to have been written anonymously by the then-obscure young writer Nelson Algren 1909-81 who went on to far greater fame as the "Poet of the Chicago Slums" author of "The Man with the Golden Arm" 1949 and other classic Chicago fiction. One of the most desirable of the WPA city guides. The Richard Delson plates are simple but striking and powerful; the often-absent color map at rear is bright and handsome. And while Jerre Mangione's "The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers' Project 1935-1943" 1972 repeats Algren's exaggeration that he wrote the "Galena Guide" historian Richard F. Bales tackles this issue anew relying on primary source material and close textual analysis in his essay "Who Wrote the Galena Guide" pp. 180-194 in his 2024 "Nelson Algren: His Life Work and Colleagues" to persuasively settle the issue. He finds Algren's claim inaccurate and misleading concluding that "Algren edited the Guide he even revised and rewrote the Guide." From the library of Terry J. Miller 1949-2025 long-time director of the U.S. Grant Home and Illinois State Historic Sites in Galena. DYKES 81. City of Galena paperback
