A Poor Wise Man

New York: George H. Doran, 1920. First Printing. Hardcover. Very good/very good. Presumed first printing even though this does not have the GHD logo on copyright page the publisher used to identify first printings -- but they did this haphazardly and there's a good chance that this is a first printing, despite not having that logo. Very good in very good dust jacket, a lovely copy. A romance set in a city meant to evoke Pittsburgh, featuring labor unrest and Bolshevik forces pitted against a steel magnate's business that inevitably pulls in his socially and politically progressive daughter, Lily Cardew. Rinehart poetically evokes Pittsburgh in the first paragraph: "The city turned its dreariest aspect toward the railway on blackened walls, irregular and ill-paved streets, gloomy warehouses, and over all a gray, smoke-laden atmosphere which gave it mystery and often beauty. Sometimes the softened towers of the great steel bridges rose above the river mist like fairy towers suspended between Heaven and earth. And again the sun tipped the surrounding hills with gold, while the city lay buried in its smoke shroud, and white ghosts of river boats moved spectrally along.