Purchased on the Drue Heinz Fund for Twentieth-Century Literature, the Elisabeth Ball Fund, and the Edwin V. Erbe, Jr. Acquisitions Fund, 2023.
1 item ([6], 330 pages) ; 27.8 x 21.5 cm
Typescript includes 6 unnumbered preliminary leaves (title, half-title, quotation, dedication, contents, section title) and 330 numbered leaves of text; with typed title page: Child and Nature / A Children's Reader / Effie Lee Newsome / Author of Gladiola Garden / Illustrated by James Lesesne Wells.
Suggested date range based on the inclusion of a poem on page 329, entitled "Northern Lights", and dated by the author "September 18, 1941", along with the fact that Newsome was believed to cease publishing in 1944. The presence of accompanying layout pages for the book executed on the versos of calendar pages for a 1941 Howard University calendar additionally suggests that the manuscript was probably prepared sometime in the early 1940s.
Estate Dr. James K. Hill, sold by Wechsler's, Capital Collections Auction, lot 52, March 10, 2023; Ian Brabner, 2023.
Unpublished collection of children's poetry by the Black American poet Effie Lee Newsome, evidently intended for publication by Carter G. Woodson's The Associated Publishers in Washington, D.C., with illustrations by African American artist James Lesesne Wells. The poems are organized into seven sections or chapters, entitled: The Child, Many Creatures, The Trees, Insect Folk, The Birds, Flowers, and God's Sky.