?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 300 - $ 500
Holding, Elisabeth Sanxay (1889-1955) The Unlit Lamp: A Study of Inter-Actions.
New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1922.
First edition, quarto, bound in publisher's green cloth titled in gilt, nicely preserved binding, retaining the original printed dust jacket (spine of jacket faded, smudges to front panel, slightly tattered at corners, generally good; slight break along inner gutter front board, early ownership signature in ink to ffep; 7 1/2 x 5 in.
"If you trace the roots of literary noir back far enough, eventually you'll run into the unlikely figure of Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. Though in recent years she has been overlooked in the rush to canonize folks such as James M. Cain and Cornell Woolrich, Holding was just as pivotal in the development of noir as a distinct literary genre. Like Cain and Woolrich, she didn't write about hardnosed good guys very much. Before the term "roman noir" had even been coined, her specialty was isolated and desperate characters with profoundly poor decision-making skills. [...] [A] favorite Holding theme [is] the crushing weight of familial obligation. [...] Family life in her books is pretty much a form of social suicide; characters are trapped by family life, surrounded but alienated at the same time." (Quoted from an article by Jake Hinkson on criminalelement.com. https://www.criminalelement.com/the-godmother-of-noir-elisabeth-sanxay-holding-jake-hinkson-the-blank-wall-the-reckless-moment-thee-deep-end-tilda-swinton/)
