First edition of The Transparent Tree by Mark Van Doren, a children's story about seeing the world from different perspectives by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and scholar.
Written by Mark Van Doren. Illustrated by Margaret Van Doren. First Edition 1940. Henry Holt and Company, New York.
Two boys, George and William, return to a farm for the summer with happy memories of all the fun they'd had there, but they'd reached the age where everything they'd once enjoyed had become b-o-r-i-n-g. Until they encounter a stranger who's out to find a tree they can't see, and they begin to see everything from a new perspective.
"Sometimes you have look at the leaves," he said, "and sometimes at the bark. For instance, here. You're not interested, probably, but I am, and I'm going to sit own and look hard at this pair of trunks. They are so much alike that it wouldn't make any difference - to you - which one turned out to be transparent. But if I picked either one it might be the wrong one, and then I would have wasted my time. Of course both of them may be the right ones. You boys don't need to stay around. It won't be interesting, watching someone look at twin trees."
Mark Van Doren (1894 - 1972) was a poet and a professor of English at Columbia University for over forty years. He won the 1940 Nobel Prize in literature for Collected Poems 1922- 1938 and inspired generations of writers, and students, as a leading advocate of liberal arts education. His wife Dorothy Van Doren was also a writer. Brother Carl was a Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic. The Van Dorens' son Charles was caught up in the game show scandals of the 1950s but enjoyed a long career with Encyclopedia Britannica.
Margaret Van Doren ( - 1993), wife of Carl Van Doren, was an illustrator, editor, and journalist.
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Condition*: Very Good/Very Good. Dust jacket: chipped along the lower edge; closed tear in the upper left corner that's taped from the inside. The jacket and cover boards are slightly bumped at the corners. Inside the book, the back endpaper has a small pencil marking you might miss else the book is in excellent condition. A vintage Christmas gift tag written to "Dick" remains with the book.
*Based on guidelines of the Independent Online Booksellers' Association.
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