• FOLLETT, Wilson | Modern American Usage: A Guide, signed by Lionel Trilling
  • FOLLETT, Wilson | Modern American Usage: A Guide, signed by Lionel Trilling

FOLLETT, Wilson | Modern American Usage: A Guide, signed by Lionel Trilling

$375.00

Follett, Wilson. Barzun, Jacques, ed., in collaboration with Carlos Baker, Frederick W. Dupee, Dudley Fitts, James D. Hart, Phyllis McGinley, and Lionel Trilling. Modern American Usage: A Guide. New York: Hill & Wang, 1966. 

8vo.; brown cloth stamped in blind on front cover and gilt on spine. In original beige dust jacket lettered in red and black; sunned; small tear at top of spine; light edgewear. 

First edition. Signed by Lionel Trilling on the front free endpaper. 

Wilson Follett (1887–1963) devoted his last years to composing a book on a subject he had studied all his life: the usage of American English. The resulting work covered issues of usage, prose composition, and style, including English grammar, syntax, and literary techniques. When he died, however, more than two-thirds of the manuscript was still in draft. Colleagues felt that it would be intolerable for the work to go unpublished, so the Columbia professor Jacques Barzun undertook the task of finishing and revising the book on the understanding that he would have help. This came from a group of distinguished writers and professors of English: Carlos Baker, Frederick W. Dupee, Dudley Fitts, James D. Hart, Phyllis McGinley, and Lionel Trilling.

Follett was generally compared favorably with Henry Watson Fowler (1858–1933), doing for Americans, as it were, what Fowler had done for British English with his monumental A Dictionary of Modern English Usage [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926]. He was considered by expert reviewers to have struck the right balance of prescriptivity and to have trodden the right line between outdated, schoolmarmish rules and laissez-faire liberality in matters of grammar and usage. The novelist, poet, literary critic and journalist Malcolm Cowley reckoned that the Guide was “sensible, vigorous, and cogent ... Follett deserves a place on the shelf beside Fowler.” The poet and critic Mark Van Doren wrote “This is a book that any conscientious writer will continue to consult as long as he lives.” 

This copy of Modern American Usage belonged to the renowned critic and academic Lionel Trilling, one of Barzun’s six collaborators.