264 pp. Silhouette illustrations throughout by J.K. Bryans. (8vo), original pictorial red cloth, with black and white decorations on cover and spine. First Edition.

Born in Michigan after the Civil War, James David Corrothers (1869-1917) began his writing career as a Chicago journalist; inspired by the writing of Paul Laurence Dunbar, he collected some of his own early work in this anthology, which used so-called “Negro dialect” in its humorous “character studies of Negro life…in the great cities of the North”. This was ironic, considering that Corrothers resigned his first job with the Chicago Tribune when a white reporter rewrote the first article he submitted to the paper using such “dialect”. None of Corrothers other books – which focus on a theme of protest against racial discrimination – were written in similar vernacular, which many Black intellectuals of the time considered racist and degrading; it’s said that Corrothers later regretted writing The Black Cat Club, even though the book was successful and established him, by the time of his death during World War I, as a leading African-American literary figure, who anticipated the protest literature of the Harlem Renaissance.