The first advertisement for D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature

Abstract

AFTER D. H. Lawrence’s American publisher Thomas Seltzer obtained a complete manuscript of Studies in Classic American Literature in June 1922, he accepted it for publication and decided to issue it ‘early in the fall’, that is, around the same time he planned to publish Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious. In their introduction to the Cambridge edition of Studies in Classic American Literature, the editors present a publication history of the book. Explaining Seltzer’s marketing plans, they observe, ‘He even seems to have advertised the book’s forthcoming appearance.’ In a footnote to this sentence, the editors give a reason for their tentative language, quoting a 6 November 1922 letter from Seltzer to Lawrence that says ‘the book has already been announced’ but noting, ‘No copy of any advertisement has, however, been traced.’1 The advertisement Seltzer mentions in the 6 November 1922 letter to Lawrence appeared in the front matter to the October 1922 issue of Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts, a modernist monthly edited and published by Harold Loeb, who is best known as the real-life inspiration for Robert Cohn in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. The announcement for Studies in Classic American Literature appears directly after one for Fantasia of the Unconscious. Its text reads: Contains long essays on Walt Whitman and Hawthorne and studies of Herman Melville, Benjamin Franklin, Richard Henry Dana and other American writers. It is interesting to note that Lawrence rediscovered Herman Melville long before the boom in South Sea Travel books made Melville a writer of contemporary popularity.2