Library of Congress Copyright Documents for An Eye for an Eye

1905. Copyright Documents for Darrow's An Eye for an Eye [Manuscript Archive]. [Darrow, Clarence (1857-1938)]. [Library of Congress Copyright Documents for An Eye for an Eye]. [Washington, D.C., 1905-1933]. 4 part-printed documents, ranging in size from 3" x 5" to 11-1/2" x 8-1/2". Light toning, horizontal and vertical fold lines to larger sheets, one of which is docketed in print and one of which is docketed in manuscript ("Renewed/ C. Darrow"), likely in Darrow's hand, light edgewear and small tears to smaller sheet. $500. * Copies of four documents from the Library of Congress that established the copyright for the novel An Eye for an Eye. They include the initial deposit notice and the receipt confirming that two copies of the book were received by the Library. Two smaller cards confirm the remittance of a $1.00 copyright fee in 1905 and 1933, when the copyright was renewed. Aside from his autobiographical novel Farmington, published in 1904, An Eye for an Eye was Darrow's only fictional work. It tells the story of Jim Jackson, who struggles with poverty and harsh circumstances before finally murdering his wife in a fit of rage. Faced with the gallows, Jackson confesses: "If ther'd been forty scaffolds right before my eyes, I'd have brought down the poker just the same." Darrow's novel is a sociological polemic which foreshadows such later works as Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Abe Ravitz in his Clarence Darrow and the American Literary Tradition (1962) observed that An Eye for an Eye was worthy of a trophy not only for sociological veracity but also for genuine literary achievement.