Title: Black Magic
Author: Paul Morand - Paul Morand was a French author whose short stories and novellas were lauded for their style, wit and descriptive power. His most productive literary period was the inter-war period of the 1920s and 1930s. He was much admired by the upper echelons of society and the artistic avant-garde who made him a cult favorite. He has been categorized as an early Modernist, and Imagist.

Morand was a graduate of the Paris Institute of Political Studies, preparing him for a diplomatic career, and also attended Oxford University.

A member of the upper class and married into wealth, he held various diplomatic posts and traveled widely. His was typical of those in his social group who enjoyed lives of privilege and entitlement, adhering to the inevitability and desirability of class distinction.

Morand espoused a reflexive adherence to racial, ethnic and anti-Semitic ideologies. His intellectual influences included the writing of Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, and the author of a treatise on the superiority of the white race, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau. During World War II, he pledged allegiance to the French Vichy regime, and became a government functionary, and Nazi collaborator. He served as Vichy ambassador in Romania and Switzerland during World War II.

He was a patron and inspirational figure for the Hussards literary movement, which opposed Existentialism.

Morand made four bids for admission to the prestigious Academie francaise and was finally accepted in 1968, over the protest of Charles de Gaulle. (Information courtesy of Wikipedia)
Translor: Hamish Miles
Publisher: The Viking Press
City: New York
Year: 1929
Printing Information: First US Edition
Binding Style: Hardcover
Pagination: vi/218 pages
Width: 6" Height: 8.5"
Book Details: This is a translation of the 1928 French novel "Magie noire." It focuses on Morand's travels in Sub-Saharan Africa and his encounters with African cultures, which he admires. The book was published in English in 1929, translated by Hamish Miles and with illustrations by Aaron Douglas


The book was reviewed in The Outlook by Lucille Fort Hewlings who compared it to André Gide's Travels in the Congo, which was published in English around the same time. Hewlings wrote: "If two Frenchmen had not happened to publish books about the negro at the same time, no one would have been so hard-hearted as to have subjected the work of Paul Morand (discussed below) to the ordeal of comparison with that of André Gide. But it happens that nothing could illustrate better than do these two books the difference between the attitude toward the negro of the versatile, up-to-the-minute but neither before nor after it journalistic mind (Morand) and the philosophical, highly cultured mind (Gide). Both men are negrophiles. But Morand is the raucous emotional follower of the Harlem cult; Gide, the intelligent critic of primitive culture, the temperate admirer of primitive virtues." Hewlings continued: "Black Magic will be interesting to readers of Bruno Frank's brilliant The Persians Are Coming, for Morand presents in Congo an example of the African out of America whose primitive appeal to anemic Europe is breaking down its civilization. This theory is further upheld by the drawings of Aaron Douglas when he gives us those pale shadowy figures dancing before a symbolic background. Pale arms raised in supplication to an African god that magnetizes decadent Europe after the scourge of war. Aaron Douglas knows his own people and his drawings are in sharp contrast to the deliberate violence of Morand's prose." (Information courtesy of Wikipedia)
Condition / Notes: This antique volume is bound in quarter black cloth and black paper-covered boards with a stylized golden stars & clouds pattern. The spine ha

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