Eden Clay

Philadelphia: Dorrance and Company. Very Good. (c.1928). First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [moderate shelfwear, foxing/spotting to top edge, front hinge a little weak, horizontal scrape to gilt spine lettering in first word of title]. (illustrated endpapers) "The frank and original Chronicles of a young Doctor serving as an Interne in the Knickerbocker Maternity Hospital of New York City," as related a friend back home in a series of "Dear Joe" letters. It should be noted that "back home" is Georgia, and that the author/narrator displays the prejudices of his background, at one point experiencing "a feeling of Nausea" after discovering that a young Swedish woman who he's been called on to attend in the late stages of her pregnancy is married to (gasp) "a full-blooded, black-as-the-Ace-of-Spades West Indian Negro." (In fact, in the course of his assigned duties he encounters a wide variety of New York's ethnic minorities, and generally has something rude or borderline racist to say about most of them.) This was apparently the author's first and only book, and one might reasonably assume that it was somewhat autobiographical. .