Museum

New York: William Morrow & Company. Very Good in Good dj. 1937. First Edition. Hardcover. [modest shelfwear, some dust-soiling to top of text block, mild discoloration of endpapers; the jacket is heavily edgeworn, with a few nicks and tiny chips along the top edge, a bit of paper loss at the spine extremities; vintage bookseller's label (Baker Hotel Library and Bookshop, Dallas, Texas) on rear pastedown]. "A novel of a furious mind unfettered by a world of chains." about a "lifer" in a British prison, written by an Irish Republican (an "Irish agitator," per the possibly Anglocentric dust jacket blurb) while incarcerated for fourteen years. (Supposedly the manuscript had to be smuggled out of prison.) The biography of the author on the rear jacket flap reads: "Born Seumas Ua Faolain (a cousin of Sean O'Faolain, author of 'A Nest of Simple Folk'), Mr. Phelan early became a worker for Irish freedom, took part in the Easter Rebellion, and after the shooting of a mail clerk in Lancashire, became known in the British press as the 'Silent Witness' because of his refusal to incriminate rebel comrades. While in prison he wrote nearly five million words, ranging in tone from lyric poems to the brutal truth about penal servitude." (According to an additional note on the rear jacket panel, he was "the first person since Oscar Wilde to be allowed to regain possession of his literary work while serving a term in an English prison.") This book was published the following year in England, under the title "Lifer." From other sources (which confirm at least the rough outline of this jacket bio), I've been able to piece together that the post office robbery in which the mail clerk was killed took place during the Irish Civil War of 1922-23, and that Phelan was sentenced to death just for his participation (he was not the triggerman), but had his sentence commuted to life in prison; after his release in 1937 he took up the life of a vagabond, and also published a number of later books about the tramp life and the criminal underground. . (Inventory #: 29988)