HERE’S A 1955 AMERICAN WOMAN AUTHOR-SIGNED FIRST EDITION BOOK TITLED:

“VENTURE INTO DARKNESS”

AUTHORED and SIGNED BY NOVELIST

ALICE TISDALE HOBART

(1882-1967)

About this item: SIGNED 1^st EDITION. Published by Longmans, Green and Co, London England, 1955, Red Cloth. Condition: Very Good+. Marked First Edition. Ex-Library with Library Bookplate inside front cover, and other Library indicia, otherwise clean and unmarked. Light shelfwear.

306pp. David Conway, born in China, ventures into the darkness of the country under Communist rule. His story is intertwined with that of Mu San, a young Chinese, who ventures into what he thinks is light.

The hero of this novel is an American businessman who comes to grips with Communism in China and fights long enough to nourish one small seed of hope that, in the midst of defeat, there is the possibility of triumph for the individual.

BOLDLY SIGNED BY HOBART ON THE FIRST FREE END PAPER .

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BIOGRAPHY OF ALICE TISDALE HOBART

Alice Tisdale Hobart (January 28, 1882 – March 14, 1967) born Alice Nourse in Lockport, New York, was an American novelist. Her most famous book, Oil for the Lamps of China, which was also made into a film, drew heavily on her experiences as the wife of an American oil executive in China amid the turmoil of the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1912.

Personal life

Spinal meningitis in infancy and a fall when she was seventeen left Alice Nourse with frail health and back trouble which caused her to be semi-invalid at periods throughout her life.

She attended the University of Chicago, but never graduated, opting instead to take a job. She first traveled to China in 1908 to visit her sister Mary, who taught at a girls' school in Hangzhou, and returned two years later to take up a post at the same establishment. After marrying Earle Tisdale Hobart, a Standard Oil Company executive, in Tientsin in 1914, she traveled to northeast China and in 1916 published an article on her experiences at the hands of Honghuzi bandits in The Atlantic Monthly. It led to a series of pieces entitled Leaves From a Manchurian Diary and formed the basis for her first book, Pioneering Where the World is Old in 1917.

Her life in Changsha formed the backdrop for her second book, By the City of the Long Sand in 1926, while an assault on Nanjing by Nationalist soldiers and her escape over the city wall to the safety of the waiting American gunboats was recounted in Within the Walls of Nanking in 1928. This book started as a piece in Harper's Magazine. Her fictional account of her experiences in China, not surprisingly, focused on the role played by Western businessmen, especially those engaged in importing and selling petroleum products.

Pidgin Cargo, set among traders on the Yangtze River, appeared in 1929 and Oil for the Lamps of China in 1933. After making her home in California in the 1940s, her subject matter expanded to encompass contemporary Mexico in The Peacock Sheds His Tail (1945) and Californian agrarian life in The Cup and the Sword (1942) and The Cleft Rock (1948). In 1959 she published her memoir, Gusty's Child.

She published more than a dozen novels in all by the time of her death in 1967, with almost four million copies in print.

Writings

Oil for the Lamps of China also published as an Armed Services Edition during WWII.
Leaves From a Manchurian Diary
Pioneering Where the World is Old
By the City of the Long Sand
Within the Walls of Nanking
Pidgin Cargo
River Supreme
The Peacock Sheds His Tail
The Cup and the Sword
The Cleft Rock
Gusty's Child
Yang and Yin
Their Own Country
Venture Into Darkness
The Serpent-Wreathed Staff
The Innocent Dreamers

References

"Alice Tisdale Hobart papers, 1916-1967". University of Oregon Special Collections & University Archives: Archives West.

What happened at Nanking: Letters of an eye-witness

"McNair Paper 67". Archived from the original on 2008-12-02.

Alice Tisdale Hobart, Gusty's Child (New York: Longmans Green, 1959)

External links

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