Peterkin, Julia. Black April

Bobbs Merrill: Indianapolis, 1927.  First edition, first issue with 'ducks quacked' on page 17 (Ahearn Collected Books).   "An extraordinary novel of Negro life on an isolated plantation" signed by the author on front free endpaper.  Black April was "accepted by the critics as being one of the best books ever written about the southern negro" (The Sunday Oregonian). A very good copy, gilt on spine and front cover dulled as usual in very good, first issue dust wrapper without Crawford blurb, price intact, extremities of spine a little chipped, one small edge tear to rear. Peterkin went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1929, the first southern novelist to receive that honor.  A household name for the better part of three decades, "Peterkin’s accomplishment lay in her upending the traditional plantation novel by replacing its gross stereotypes with rural black southerners of complexity, stamina, integrity, and courage, while valorizing the African spiritual inheritance as a transcendent fo