BRECHT, BERTOLT

A Penny For The Poor

New York: Hillman-Curl, 1938. First Edition in English; first American edition. Translated from the German by Desmond I. Vesey. Verses translated by Christopher Isherwood. Inscribed by the author in 1946 to Saul Bellow’s especially close friend and attorney (as well as the model for Harvey Simkin in Herzog), “for Sam Goldberg with best wishes Bertolt Brecht, ‘46 N.Y.C.” Inscribed Brecht is notably uncommon. While this novel followed 1928’s Threepenny Opera by several years, it features some of the same characters and situations, but is not a novelization of that celebrated work. In 1959, a song from it, “Mack the Knife” became a hit for Bobby Darin. The collaboration of Brecht and Kurt Weill was a famous and productive one. Asked why this ended, Weill’s wife, Lotte Lenya, wryly replied to the effect that Weill couldn’t set Marx to music. The back cover cloth, extending onto the spine, is waterstained, affecting as well the back panel of the mended, splitting dust jacket and the edges of a few pages of text. All books described as first editions are first printings unless otherwise noted.

[Book #1527]

Price: $5,000.00