The Presence of Everett Marsh

Indianapolis/New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. Very Good+ in Very Good dj. (c.1937). First Edition. Hardcover. [a bit of wear at both ends of spine, moderate age-toning to top of text block, a little offsetting/minor discoloration to both endpapers and pastedowns; jacket lightly edgeworn, minor paper loss at base of spine, ragged tear across top of spine (with old internal tape-repair, small paper loss at upper front hinge), small tears at a couple of corners, short closed tear and associated diagonal crease at lower left corner of front panel]. Novel about an American high school and its principal (the title character); designated "the Big School," its culture is described as "brutish, throbbing, male life, with underneath a hard substratum of something real; something young and savage but now and again controlled, menacing, powerful." The jacket blurb situates the book as an American version of the English tradition of novels about "life in the great public schools," citing "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" -- although this work seems to be a good deal more rough-edged, not to say hard-boiled. There's a disclaimer that "the city in which this story is set and the institution about which the tale revolves have none but imagined existence," but the opening paragraph proclaims the latter to be in a "Wisconsin city." The first novel (and one of his few for adult readers) by this New York-born author (1905-1983), who at the time had just wrapped up a decade-long stint as a English teacher at Du Pont Manual Training High School in Louisville, Kentucky, and had moved on to a faculty position at Amherst College. Most of his later books were non-fiction, and he seems to have carved out a particular niche as an author of young readers' biographies of authors (Thoreau, Emerson, Stevenson, Irving, Carroll, Conan Doyle, Twain, etc.); he also wrote a number of volumes on advertising, publishing history, and other topics. .