Fields of Wonder (Presentation copy)

New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "For Marion - who finds the world a field of wonder for her lens - Sincerely, Langston, Atlanta University, March 17, 1947." A Very Good copy in like dust jacket. Original green cloth, spine lettered in gilt, fore edge untrimmed. With dust jacket. Spine slightly rubbed, extremities bumped; jacket unclipped, spine and folds browned, extremities lightly worn with a few small chips.

The recipient, Marion Palfi (1907 - 1978), was a photographer who fled to the US from Germany as a refugee during the Second World War. She befriended Hughes in Harlem shortly after her arrival, and he invited her to speak to his class at Atlanta University in 1947, where he was teaching his first semester as Visiting Professor of Creative Writing (see Rampersad, p. 128). Palfi photographed Harlem Renaissance writers throughout the 1940s: her portraits are featured in Arna Bontemps's who's who of Black America, We Have Tomorrow (1945), and several of her photographs of Hughes are held among the poet's papers at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Her photographs also featured in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1950, and she won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967.

Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume II, 1941-1967, 1988.