Highsmith, Patricia | First edition, presentation copy

Highsmith, Patricia
The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder. New York: Penzler Books, 1986

8vo. Publisher's cloth and boards in original dustjacket. Chipped along upper fold and head of jacket spine panel.

Presentation copy of the first edition, inscribed to José García Villa "...with love from Pat Highsmith 24 Oct, 1986." With doodle of a highball glass.

José García Villa was born in Manila in 1908, before moving to New Mexico to pursue his studies, and ultimately to Greenwich Village in New York City. There, he joined a community of modernist poets, including e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, among others, and was affectionately known as "The Pope of Greenwich Village." He wrote his poems under the pseudonym Doveglion (a composite of dove, eagle, and lion) and was admired, according to Marianne Moore, for "the reverence, the raptness, the depth of concentration in [his] bravely deep poems." His 1933 story collection, Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others, was "the first work of fiction by a Filipino writer published by a major United States-based press."

Villa received “numerous honors and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Philippines Heritage Award, a Poetry Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and a Shelley Memorial Award. In 1973 he was named a National Artist of the Philippines, and he also served as a cultural advisor to the Philippine government. He died in New York City on February 7, 1997.”

REFERENCE
Academy of American Poets; Villa, Doveglion: Collected Poems, ed. John Edwin Cowen

PROVENANCE
José García Villa (inscription)

Condition Report:
Condition as described in catalogue entry.