Defender of The Faith: William Jennings Bryan: The Last Decade, 1915-1925

New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1965. Very Good/Very Good. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. First Edition. Inscribed by author.on front free endpaper: "For Bill & Harriett, with all best wishes, Love, Larry." Octavo; ix + 385pp, including index. Photographic dust jacket with orange tint. Burgundy cloth with silver lettering on front panel and spine.

Unclipped dust jacket spine sunned; normal, slight wear to jacket top and bottom, and to jacket corners. Cloth very clean, square, and bright with slight abrasions to spine crown and foot. Pages clean; binding tight.

Levine's study seeks to complicate, but not radically contradict, the conventional notion of the aging Bryan as a reactionary evangelical conservative. Levine, a student of Richard Hofstadter, was a prominent historian of U.S. multiculturalism and analysis across wide, previously neglected, demographic swaths before it was fashionable. The "Bill & Harriet" of the inscription are William L. Taylor and wife; Taylor was staff director of the United States Commission on Civil Rights in the mid-sixties, and helped to draft the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act.