8vo. (Some spotting or toning to endpapers.) Original cloth-backed boards; dust jacket (short creases and chipping to spine and fore-corners, faint dampstaining to front panel). Provenance: Sol Stein (1926-2019), American author and Publisher of Stein and Day (author's inscription).

FIRST EDITION. PRESENTATION COPY, INSCRIBED BY THE BALDWIN TO HIS FRIEND AND PUBLISHER, SOL STEIN, on dedication page: “For Sol: –In honor of the splendidly disputed passage. love, Jimmy, god help us." Stein began his lifelong association with James Baldwin when they were both editors of The Magpie, the literary magazine at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. In 1955, Stein would edit and publish Baldwin’s anthology of essays on the black experience, Notes of a Native Son, and later chronicled their literary relationship and brotherhood in Native Sons: A Friendship That Created One of the Greatest Works of the Twentieth Century: Notes of a Native Son (2004).