Bright Skin [Signed, Numbered]

Item Details

Indianapolis, Bobbs Merrill, 1932, Hardcover

First Edition, First Printing, Near Fine in red cloth with previous owner's bookplate on front pastedown.

8vo., 348 pp. Publisher's original scarlet cloth, gilt titles on spine and top edge gilt. Without dust jacket as issued. First edition, limited issue, number 62 of 250 copies, numbered and signed by the author on the limitation page. Hanna 2847. Laid in is a note signed by Peterkin on her Lang Syne Plantation note card paper— "Dear Mrs. H____ / Certainly I'll / autograph your book / and with pleasure / Yours sincerely / Julia Peterkin / September 2, 1942." Lang Syne is a historic plantation in Fort Motte, near St. Matthews South Carolina, where Peterkin lived with her planter husband. 

Peterkin won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929 for Scarlet Sister Mary, becoming the first South Carolinian so honored and one of the earliest white American authors to write sympathetically and seriously about African American life in the rural South, rejecting the sentimental stereotypes common to her era. Bright Skin, her fourth novel, follows a young mulatto woman on a South Carolina cotton plantation and continues the themes that defined her celebrated body of work.

This is copy number 62 of a limited edition of 250, signed by Peterkin on the limitation page — already a desirable format for a Pulitzer-winning author's later novel. What elevates this particular copy further is a separate, handwritten autograph note from Peterkin herself, tipped in, cheerfully agreeing to sign the book for its original owner: a small but charming piece of correspondence that personalizes the volume and confirms its direct chain of ownership back to the author.

Near Fine in red cloth, with tasteful previous owner's bookplate on the front pastedown. Tight and square.

Item #622202629