Rebel Mail Runner

New York: Holiday House, 1954. First Edition. Hard Cover. Very Good/No Jacket. 7x5x0. Van Veen, Stuyvesant. First edition. Lacks jacket. A few small smudges on fore edge. 1954 Hard Cover. 221 pp. Red cloth, black titles, pictorial endpapers and chapter headers by Stuyvesant Van Veen. From the author's foreword: "This is an imaginary story, about an imaginary boy; but the Confederate Underground Mail Service, from Missouri to the Deep South, was a thrilling fact of the Civil War, and its daring and resourceful chief, Absalom Grimes, was as real as any American in history. His memoirs exist today, and the adventures of himself and his lieutenants, some of them retold here, are still remembered up and down the Mississippi River." About the author: "Manly Wade Wellman (May 21, 1903 - April 5, 1986) was an American writer. He is best known for his fantasy and horror stories set in the Appalachian Mountains and for drawing on the native folklore of that region, but he wrote in a wide variety of genres including science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, detective fiction, western fiction, juvenile fiction and non-fiction. In the later 1920s, during the silent film era, Wellman wrote movie reviews for the Wichita Beacon. He also contributed to the writing of the comic book The Spirit while the franchise's creator, Will Eisner, was serving in the US military during World War II. Three of Wellman's most famous reappearing protagonists are Silver John, aka John the Balladeer, the wandering backwoods minstrel with a silver-stringed guitar; the elderly 'occult detective' Judge Pursuivant; and the playboy/adventurer John Thunstone. Wellman was born in Angola. After graduating from Wichita Municipal University (now Wichita State University) in Kansas, he went on to receive a bachelor of laws degree from Columbia University. Wellman was a long-time resident of North Carolina. In 1955 he earned the Edgar Allan Poe Award for nonfiction.