Joseph and His Friend: A Story of Pennsylvania
New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1870. Very Good -. Item #50569
New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1870. First Edition, Printing A, per BAL. Octavo; original green cloth stamped in gilt, dark topstain, gray endpapers; 361pp. + [2]pp. advertisements. Boards worn along edges and joints with exposure, splits, and slight loss to spine ends; erroneously stamped as Joseph and His Friends; slight lean with rear hinge starting but binding remains sound; contemporary ownership inscription of "Lydia" in pencil, a few stray marks and old stains, overall about Very Good.
Joseph and His Friend explores the intense attraction between the title character, a Pennsylvania farmer, and Philip, a stranger he meets on a train when "his heart sprang with an instinct beyond his control." Joseph's marriage to Julia Blessing is an obstacle to their love, but Philip tells of an Edenic place in the West where they can be together and free from the "distorted laws of men." Joseph cannot bring himself to move West, but, as Gunn explains, the scene ends tenderly, "Each gave way to the impulse of his manly love, rarer, alas! but as tender and true as the love of woman, and they drew nearer and kissed each other," (p. 217).
Joseph's marriage to Julia sours, he contemplates suicide, and later she kills herself. Joseph is accused of murder, but Philip, with the help of Alan Pinkerton, clears his name. At the celebration, Joseph "drew his chair near to Philip's, their hands closed upon each other, and they were happy in the tender and perfectly manly love which united them," (p. 340).
Though he admits that ordering and identifying the first American gay novels is inherently difficult, author and scholar Drewey Wayne Gunn lists Joseph and His Friend as the first entry in his study on gay American novels, noting that Alan Dale's A Marriage below Zero (1889) is often cited as the first published novel by an American to make overt homosexuality its theme, but Joseph "seems to be lacking only a vocabulary; its plot inverts Dale's, so that the two together presage a whole series of novels in which a gay male struggles with the question of a straight marriage." Gunn further notes that Taylor "goes further than any American writer, save Whitman, had dared venture." Professor James Gifford also notes that "the book lays some claim to being one of the first American novels with an overt homoerotic undercurrent," (p. 27) and he further explores the theme of a Western American Eden in which men can explore their love for each other removed from many of the strictures of society. An important work in the development of gay American literature and uncommon in the original cloth.
References:
Drewey Wayne Gunn, Gay American Novels, 1870-1970. A Reader's Guide. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2016
James Gifford, Dayneford's Library: American Homosexual Writing, 1900-1913. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.
Wright 1851-1874 #2433; BAL 19713.
Price: $2,500.00