Robert Lowell. First edition, stated first printing. New York: Farrah, Straus and Giroux, 1965. Both unclipped dust jacket, in a mylar protective wrapper, and hardcover are in Near Fine condition. Jacket designed by Francis Parker. No writing or markings found in this well-preserved edition, 194 pp. Introduction by Robert Brustein and Director's Note by Jonathan Miller. Illustrated with photographs of the production.
Includes Lowell's first three plays, "Benito Cereno," "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," and "Endicott and the Red Cross." Lowell won the 1965 Vernon Rice-Drama Desk Award for this series of three plays that appeared Off-Broadway.
"The most powerful figure in postwar American poetry confronts the most haunting American fiction writers of the nineteenth century. The result is a mythical, nightmare history of three centuries in America. In Endecott and the Red Cross, Hawthorne's Puritan governor, horrified by his colony's high living, declares, "Everything in America will be Bible, blood and iron. England will no longer exist." The other two plays, based on Hawthorne's My Kinsman, Major Molineux and Melville's Benito Cereno, take up the themes of parricide and independence: one in Boston on the eve of the Revolutionary War, the other on a merchant ship in the Caribbean in the early nineteenth century. The plays were first performed in 1964, when the poet Randall Jarrell wrote: "I have never seen a better American play than Benito Cereno, the major play in Robert Lowell's The Old Glory . . . The play is a masterpiece of imaginative knowledge." (Amazon).
