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Paperback / softback. New. New Book; Fast Shipping from UK; Not signed; Not First Edition; Matthew Townes, aspiring obstetrician, has hit the glass ceiling. Unable to continue his medical studies in New York City, the young man becomes disillusioned with the reality of racism within the United States and heads for Germany. Ar

Hardback. New. New Book; Fast Shipping from UK; Not signed; Not First Edition; Matthew Townes, aspiring obstetrician, has hit the glass ceiling. Unable to continue his medical studies in New York City, the young man becomes disillusioned with the reality of racism within the United States and heads for Germany. Ar

New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928. W.E.B. Du Bois' second novel, an international romance about an African American intellectual and an Indian princess and their cohort of Asian and African revolutionaries. The book was largely a financial and critical failure upon publication, with one reviewer stating: [Du Bois'] latest novel, Dark Princess, which mingles reality, fantasy and satire in distressing proportions, bogs the reader before he gets well into it. Characterization eludes Du Bois, probably because he is more interested in the future of the Negro race as a whole than in the Negro as novelist" (p. 607, Chamberlain, J. "The Negro As Writer: II," The Bookman: A Review of Books and Life, 70(6)). But the book has since received much scholarly attention for its intertexuality, subversion of the Eurocentric literary form, symbolism, and propagandistic value. One scholar describes it thusly: "Dark Princess ultimately resorts to a magical and bald-facedly escapist realm for its protagonist in which all contradictions that have built up over the course of the romance are haphazardly ousted, as any realistic course of action has been thwarted. The opulent combination of imageries from around the world in which the protagonists come to their romantic and political resolution points to the author’s unsuccessful quest to locate materials from which to create a literary world that reflects the global ambitions of the work, yet nonetheless attempting to live up to his own call ‘that if you want romance to deal with you must have it here and now and in your own hands’" (1926: 296; Adamik, Verena. Making worlds from literature: W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece and Dark Princess, Thesis Eleven 2021 162:1, 105-120). The book was later republished in 1995 by the University of Mississippi Press and later by Oxford University Press, but copies of this first edition only occasionally appear in the trade (with none currently being offered [Jan. 2025]. As a humorious aside regarding the book's title, a 1927 letter from Alfred Harcourt to Du Bois reads: "Dear Dr. DuBois / Do you want the title to be 'The Dark Princess' or merely 'Dark Princess?' We prefer the latter, but you're the doctor." 8vo. Black cloth boards pictorially stamped in orange, 311 p. Lacking the scarce dust jacket. Cloth is worn along the board edges and spine ends with corner tips just exposed, about very good.

New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. First edition. A little rubbing along the edges of the boards, else a fine and bright copy in a fine example of the rare dust jacket with the slightest of age-toning and an old, faint pencil price on the spine. One of two novels written by Du Bois, this one about an African-American medical doctor who can't secure an internship because of his color. "In passionate revolt he flees from America. One day in Berlin... he meets the Dark Princess, an exquisite Indian woman of noble birth. Through her he is made aware of a movement among the dark races for self-expression and self-determination, and becomes involved in an adventure of such magnitude that it absorbs his energies on his return to America." Only the third jacketed copy we've seen in 40 years.