Thomas, Dylan | Presentation copy

Thomas, Dylan

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. Norfolk: New Directions, 1940

8vo. Some toning to pages. In red cloth boards, gilt spine, with printed dustjacket; jacket toned with small chips at extremities, edges toned with minor soiling, endpapers browned especially at joints. 

Presentation copy, given to José García Villa. Inscribed "from Dylan Thomas to Jose Garcia Villa" on flyleaf. First American edition.

Poet, writer, and artist José García Villa was born in Manila in 1908, before moving to New Mexico to pursue his studies, and ultimately to Greenwich Village in New York City. There, he joined a community of modernist poets, including e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, among others, and was affectionately known as "The Pope of Greenwich Village." He wrote his poems under the pseudonym Doveglion (a composite of dove, eagle, and lion) and was admired, according to Marianne Moore, for "the reverence, the raptness, the depth of concentration in [his] bravely deep poems." His 1933 story collection, Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others, was "the first work of fiction by a Filipino writer published by a major United States-based press."

Villa received “numerous honors and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Philippines Heritage Award, a Poetry Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and a Shelley Memorial Award. In 1973 he was named a National Artist of the Philippines, and he also served as a cultural advisor to the Philippine government. He died in New York City on February 7, 1997.”

REFERENCE

Academy of American Poets; Villa, Doveglion: Collected Poems, ed. John Edwin Cowen

PROVENANCE

José García Villa (inscription)