Joseph Hergesheimer

James Branch Cabell portrays Joseph Hergesheimer as a writer forged by fourteen years of rejection, whose stubborn devotion to fiction shaped an imagination of extraordinary focus. That hard-won discipline, Cabell suggests, explains the obsessive men and remote, ornamental women who dominate Hergesheimer's novels. In these books, women are seldom intimate companions; they appear as beautiful presences, desired or admired more as symbols and trophies than as partners in shared life. Cabell sees this distance as part of Hergesheimer's artistic nature, a life lived in private fidelity to beauty and purpose rather than ordinary domestic claims. Across The Lay Anthony, Mountain Blood, The Three Black Pennys, Java Head, and especially Linda Condon, characters pursue ideals of beauty, chastity, atonement, or passion, only to find frustration, loss, or death. For Cabell, Linda Condon best expresses Hergesheimer's creed: beauty is divine, fragile, and worthy of devotion even when human existence cannot fully contain it. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.