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Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
BERRYMAN, JOHN. 77 Dream Songs. 8vo, publisher's blue cloth, spine gilt-lettered, thin fade to spine tips; unclipped dust jacket, few short chips including to spine panel tips touching two letters, few short closed tears, scattered foxing. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Co., (1964)
first edition, presentation copy, inscribed and signed by berryman with what amounts to a short letter: "To Anne / and to Chis--if, as Kate & I / hope without knowing anything really / about it, you have got together / again. We were bitterly sorry to / hear--from William, not in the least / as gossip--of your separation. / Whatever is happening or does, let / me wish you a restoration of the / happiness I so admired in you on / Mr. [Robert] Frost's last summer. / Affectionately / John / The Abbott Hospital / Minneapolis 3,Minn. / 22 April '64." The book was published the same month and awarded the Pulitzer Prize in May 1965. The recipients--Anne and Chis--are both referred to in Dream Song 38, contained in this volume. The Abbott Hospital was a place of refuge for Berryman when overwhelmed by his alcoholism. "In hospitals he found his society," Saul Bellow wrote in his introduction to Recovery, Berryman's only novel. "University colleagues were often more philistine, less tolerant of poets than were alcoholics or suicidal girls." Stefanik A11.1.a.
