LOWELL, Robert.

£700 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Old Glory. First edition, presentation copy, inscribed by Lowell on the title page to the film director and screenwriter Elia Kazan: "For Elia, with affection & admiration, from Cal". "Cal" was Lowell's nickname from his days at St Mark's, an Episcopalian prep school in Boston, where "his antisocial behavior earned him the sobriquet of 'Cal', short for both Caligula, the Roman tyrant, and Caliban, the beast-man of Shakespeare's Tempest" (ANB).Lowell and Kazan likely met in May 1962, when they were both invited by JFK to the White House for a dinner with French novelist and culture minister André Malraux, at which Leonard Bernstein, Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams were also present. Kazan later suggested that Lowell translate Aeschylus's Oresteia, which he did in 1978.The Old Glory collects three plays, which Lowell intended to be performed together as a trilogy: two are adaptations of short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and one a stage version of a novella by Herman Melville.

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