[ROBERT McALMON] ROBERT SCULLY (1895-1956) A Scarlet Pansy. Frontispiece. 8vo, publisher's plum cloth,...

[ROBERT McALMON] ROBERT SCULLY (1895-1956)

A Scarlet Pansy.

Frontispiece. 8vo, publisher's plum cloth, leaning and slightly shaken, scattered small stains and scratches, corners worn with light exposure, printed paper spine label, toned and rubbed; pencil annotations to first few pages, occasional foxing chiefly to blank margins, ex-collection Gershom Leman (part of the clandestine erotica underground in NY in the 1930s) with his inked signature to front flyleaf. New York: William Faro, Inc. [i.e. Samuel Roth], 1933.

scarce first edition of a vivid depiction of queer life in the early twentieth century, told through the coming-of-age story of Fay Etrange, the gender and sexual non-conforming protagonist. Though Fay is never referred to as male, it was obvious to readers, but not the authorities, who never filed obscenity charges. Pseudonymously written by Robert McAlmon, modernist poet and publisher and an active member of Greenwich Village's early 20th century Bohemian Milieu. Along with William Carlos Williams, he founded the famed Contact Review, one of the most important of the so-called "little magazines" instrumental in bringing Modernist poetics and prose to the public, and later founded Contact publishing, which published Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, H.D., and Mary Butts, among others.