A Little Girl is Dead [*SIGNED*]

Cleveland/New York: The World Publishing Company. Near Fine in Good dj. (c.1965). First Edition. Hardcover. [modest shelfwear, faint soiling to edges of text block; the jacket has several small tears and minor bits of paper loss at several corners]. SIGNED by the author (no inscription) on the front endpaper. The story of the murder of 14-year-old factory girl Mary Phagan in 1913, and the conviction and subsequent lynching of the factory superintendent, Leo Frank, for the crime, an outcome attributed to a virulent combination of antisemitism and mob frenzy. The author, one of the most popular mid-century chroniclers of Jewish-American life, was eleven years old at the time and had been absorbed with the case ever since he was a kid selling newspapers on New York's Lower East Side with headlines about it. One of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in American history, the case has also inspired numerous dramatizations for film and the stage (including the Tony Award-winning 1998 musical "Parade"). And even in 1965, fifty-two years after the fact, the historical record wasn't yet complete: laid in to this copy of the book is the May 1982 issue of the ADL Bulletin, with a front-page story "A Witness Reveals: 'Leo Frank Was Innocent'," discussing the previously-unknown evidence provided by 83-year-old Alonzo Mann, who was a witness at Frank's trial in 1913 -- evidence that would have exonerated Frank had he revealed it at the time. Signed by Author .