Inscribed Copy of His Book “Sangar: The Mad Recreant Knight of the West”

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REED, JOHN. (1887-1920). American journalist, poet and revolutionary; author of Ten Days that Shook the World, a firsthand account of the Russia’s 1917 October Revolution. Signed book. (“John Reed”). Slim 8vo. (Riverside: Hillacre Book House, 1913). Reed’s poem, Sangar: The Mad Recreant Knight of the West, dedicated to muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936). Inscribed in black ink on the front free endpaper to American playwright, poet and fellow Harvard graduate, PERCEY MACKAYE (1875-1956). “To Percy MacKaye from his friend and admirer.”

Reed’s literary career began at Harvard where he was an editor of the Harvard Lampoon and The Harvard Monthly. It was also as an undergraduate that he became active in socialist circles, attending meetings of the Socialist Club and beginning a correspondence with one of America’s leading muckraking journalists Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936).

After working as an editor at McClure’s, where he published articles exposing political corruption, Steffens co-founded with Ida Tarbell, in 1906, The American Magazine, where he employed Reed in an entry level job upon his graduation from Harvard in 1910. Soon, Reed was contributing to the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, The Forum, and The Century Magazine. In 1913, Reed was arrested for his involvement in a strike at Paterson, New Jersey’s silk mills. That same year, Metropolitan Magazine sent him to Mexico as a war correspondent embedded with Pancho Villa’s army, which earned him a national reputation. Reed’s collected war coverage appeared in Insurgent Mexico published in 1914.

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John Reed

In 1915, Reed helped found the Provincetown Players, a group instrumental in developing modern American drama. Begun as a summer amusement, it evolved into the Playwright’s Theater in New York City where it produced several plays by the then unknown Eugene O’Neill. Reed remained active in the organization until 1917, when he left in a fury over his wife’s affair with O’Neill, sailing to Petrograd, just in time to cover the Bolshevik Revolution. It is for his riveting eyewitness account of the revolution, Ten Days that Shook the World, for which Lenin himself wrote an introduction, that Reed is best remembered. In 1919, Reed and other radicals were expelled from the National Socialist Convention, after which he led the newly constituted Communist Labor Party. He edited its paper, The Voice of Labor, and penned antiwar articles that resulted in his indictment for sedition. Using a forged passport, he fled to the Soviet Union and died in Moscow on October 17, 1920. His remains are interred in the Kremlin necropolis.

Sangar: The Mad Recreant Knight of the West, was first published by Poetry magazine in 1913. Later that year, Reed’s friend Frederick C. Bursch (1874-?), owner of Hillacre Book House, issued an edition of 500 copies dedicated to Lincoln Steffens for his involvement in the trial of the pro-union McNamara brothers who, in 1910, had dynamited the Los Angeles Times building. Represented by Clarence Darrow, the pair confessed to Steffens who defended their bombing as a “justifiable dynamiting” in retaliation against rampant anti-union suppression and violence. Steffens attempted to persuade the trial judge to grant the brothers leniency, but his interference had the opposite effect and the MacNamara’s received lengthy jail sentences. The Los Angeles labor movement collapsed in the face of the controversy and Steffens was heavily criticized.

Reed garnered much praise for his poem and “Percy MacKaye wrote warmly about ‘Sangar,’ [likely the letter to which our letter is referring] and Reed replied: ‘I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your note appreciating my ‘Sangar.’ No one has ever before written me so about anything I ever did. It opens up vast possibilities and stimulates my imagination to conceive a time when I shall be able to tell people a little part of the glorious things I see. Every day of my life I see more of them,’” (John Reed: The Making of a Revolutionary, Hicks). In his autobiography, “Steffens insisted on regarding [‘Sangar’] as ‘a fierce poem denouncing me,’” (ibid.).

Reed and Steffens continued to evolve along similar ideological lines. Like Reed, Steffens covered the Mexican Revolution, beginning in 1914, which ultimately convinced him that revolution was more effective than reform. Following his 1919 visit to the Soviet Union, Steffens praised the revolution, stating “I have seen the future, and it works.” By the 1930s Steffens had become disillusioned by Soviet Russia but continued his activities in labor and left-wing causes.

Son of prominent actor and producer Steele MacKaye, Percy MacKaye graduated from Harvard in 1897 and followed his father into the theater. A member of the Cornish artists’ colony in New Hampshire, he was a prolific playwright whose works include The Canterbury Pilgrims, Jeanne d’Arc, Sappho and Phaon, Anti-Matrimony: A Satirical Comedy, to name but a few.

With the original gray cloth boards and in the original slipcase. The slim volume is in superb condition and the box shows light signs of wear.

Inscribed Copy of His Book “Sangar: The Mad Recreant Knight of the West”