Unfair Arguments with Existence

New York: New Directions, 1963. Uncorrected long galleys, (235 x 283mm). Folded, tiny tears, near fine. Long galleys for in-house use of this paperback original. Very scarce; probably only a handful of copies were produced. Ferlinghetti is remembered first as a poet (A Coney Island of the Mind remains among the best-selling books of American poetry) and as the co-founder of City Lights Books, the San Francisco bookshop and publishing house that became the nerve center of the Beat movement. But he was also a playwright, and Unfair Arguments with Existence was his first published work for the theater. The seven short plays move from the relatively conventional realism of The Soldiers of No Country toward progressively more abstract forms, culminating in the pure, premeditated action of The Nose of Sisyphus, in a territory Ferlinghetti called "third stream theatre," just short of the unrehearsed happening. Each play isolates a single figure within his own world and obsessions; what Ferlinghetti proposed as the modern replacements for the fatal flaws of classical drama. Acknowledging debts to Artaud, and closer in form and content to Ionesco, Genet, and Tardieu than to any American playwright of the period, the plays brought to the stage the same restless, anti-establishment energy that had defined his poetry, applied now to a medium he believed was overdue for the same liberation.