Bow of Burning Gold (Signed, Limited)

Chicago: Robert Packard & Company, 1929. First, Limited Edition. First printing. One of an unspecified number of signed copies in the limited first edition. Octavo (23cm). Leather-backed patterned paper boards; 171pp. Tight, clean copy with a bit of fading to boards at margins, mild rubbing to board edges, with corner tips just exposed; Very Good or better, lacking the presumed dustwrapper.

The second published collection by the prolific American poet, long-time professor of literature at Earlham College and, from the McCarthy era on, a political conservative in the neofascist mold, with proficiencies in red-baiting, faculty-cleansing, and textbook-banning. He is credited as a co-founder, with William F. Buckley and others, of the conservative journal National Review, which he left in the early Sixties to join the upstart John Bircher mouthpiece American Opinion. As an undergraduate, Root studied with Robert Frost at Amherst, showing early promise and winning backhanded praise from Frost, who called him "the second best poet in America;" but by the end (in 1973), his reputation as a political gadfly had far outstripped his reputation as a poet.